Mosque shooter was given gun license by a ‘stretched’ system, verified by two referees who had met him five times between them

The second phase of the inquest into the mosque shooting is currently ongoing, and it is right now examining how the terrorist was able to obtain his firearms license and the guns used to commit the attack.

The answer is “Really, really easily”.

The 10 year expiration period for firearms licenses created a peak and off-peak for license renewals, meaning that for four years out of ten, the same number of staff were overseeing and approving double the number of licenses they usually would. Three people are now employed for the scaled-back version of the role of the person who granted the shooter’s license undertook in 2017, when the license was granted.

(Which makes me wonder, would Luxon, Willis and McKee consider this a “back-office” role, a frontline role?)

Good thing we’re not increasing the workload of public servants again after not having given them all that much meaningful extra support in the first place.

There was no central material available to refer to regarding legislation interpretation, meaning the way the Arms Act was applied differed from region to region. Sporting semi-automatic rifles could be purchased with a regular license, with the differences between them and the military style semi-automatic (MMSA) rifles used by the shooter described as mostly cosmetic. While the mosque shooter did not have an E-category license needed for these weapons, he was still able to buy high capacity magazines used in MSSAs, increasing the number of rounds he could fire before needing to reload.

Part of the problem was visibility of license holders and their guns — without sighting the weapon, police could not have known of the changes the shooter had made.

The licensing system was described in court as a “high trust model”, in which current license holders acting as referees are the primary judge of character for whether the next person to come along should be able to own a firearm. From the shooters own referees we can see how this doesn’t really require two individual referees, as his license was vouched for by a father and son, with the father only knowing the shooter through the son. It’s unclear how involved the father was in his son’s gun license applications, but I would assume this was the case.

Gun culture is a real factor in how the shooter gained his guns; the arms officer who approved the terrorist his license described how owning a gun had moved from being considered a privilege to being “a right” in New Zealand. I dare say this is a culture firearms minister and lobbyist Nicole McKee is moving us back towards. The American influence on this cannot be understated either, and I believe there are direct links to make here between American gun culture and the radical and fringe politics that have also made their way to our shores; for example, the existence of sovereign citizens is also based on these ideas of personal liberty that American gun culture shares.

It’s notably not something that can be acknowledged or affected by legislation, and the culture comes not just from police and the firearms teams, but from gun owners and the referees themselves who are vouching for others to also have the firearms that they view as a ‘right’.

The shooter’s gun (Source: Wikiepdia.) There’s something incredibly ironic about the censoring of a homophobic slur on a picture of an assault rifle that was used to kill 51 muslims while the references to ethnic hatred remain unmarred.

This is well reflected by the examination today of the two referees for the shooter, whose attitudes can best be described as “hostile” — though maybe defensive would be a better term. That is somewhat understandable, as they are doubtless perceiving a lot of blame being placed on their shoulders for the outcome of their actions. They themselves had E-class licenses which gave their testimony toward the shooter a lot of weight, as they had been “scrutinised heavily” — but it’s very easy to see the distinction between ‘fit to themselves own a gun’ and ‘fit to be the primary judge of character for another person to own a gun’.

There is little reflection to be gained from their testimony, except for us as a nation to consider what it takes to vouch for someone who is seeking something the state has deemed ‘a responsibility’. We do have another common system of referee-granted license in this country, and that is a passport, a document that most would also consider a right more than it is a privilege. It can be said that a lot more weight should be put on the endorsement and granting of a firearms license than on a passport — but should it? Is it? Do you?

How responsible would you feel exactly if someone you had refereed for a passport committed a terror attack?

How about if you were a referee for a visa?

For other referee documents, this is usually a tick-box activity, designed to catch out only the most openly unsuitable candidates. And I don’t think it’s a foreign concept to most people to vouch for someone for these things who you don’t really know well — many of us have acquaintances with few local ties who have had to or would have to scramble for referees, or may even ourselves have vouched for say, young people who needed a current passport holder not related to them to give them a stamp of approval. I remember doing this scramble myself at seventeen and running into all sorts of unforeseen obstacles where the people I knew well either didn’t have passports or were too closely related to me. And that’s with a passport — heaps of people have those! Owning a firearm is a much more exclusive club, and I can absolutely see how a situation would unfold in which license holders are asked to vouch for people they do not know especially well.

Did the referee holders fully understand what they were vouching for, and the potential consequences? Their testimony would suggest not. The first referee, who met the terrorist playing World of Warcraft, described his online airing of extremist views as “shitposting” done by “everyone” in order to get “a reaction”, and said he had not fully gauged the risks or possible consequences of his referral, and now would be much more vigilant. The second referee, the father of the first, had said the young man was “outstanding”, despite only having met him twice while he was staying in his home. When he was questioned further, the man became hostile and threatened to walk out.

Which brings us to another uncomfortable issue: the people operating within this ‘gun culture’, their political views, and how many of them are the least fit to be judging who can possess the most lethal weapons we legally allow in this country.

Which is not to say all gun owners are irresponsible — plenty of them are. But amongst them are a disproportionate number of people with seriously questionable views and beliefs. Of the people in my life, the ones who own guns are the people I would least trust with this role, and they the people I know who I would most expect to accidentally vouch for mass-murdering radical. Sorry if they’re reading this, but it’s true. There is a massive link between racism, radicalism and conservatism, and we might as well be honest and throw gun ownership into that grossly-overlapping venn-diagram.

And I won’t say that leftists can’t be radicals, or they don’t ever commit violence, but they certainly don’t commit mass violence and shootings on the scale that the radicalised right does. Nothing can be a better demonstration of that than the two attempted assassinations of Trump, both of which came from people with (former?) right-wing views who themselves potentially previously supported Trump (I include the question mark there’s been an amazing lack of follow-up on that aspect of their motives that absolutely would have been torn into had they been obviously from the left of the aisle, as was originally and hysterically accused by Republicans after both attempts).

So given we are allowing gun owners (who often make up a certain subset of people and are frankly more likely to be racist, anti-immigration, homophobic, sexist, and violent) to be the judge of who gets guns and who doesn’t, it’s incredibly alarming that our firearms minister Nicole McKee thinks this is the system with more than enough safeguards that we can just get rid of those extra protections the Labour government introduced in response to the shooting specially to try and catch out current license holders who may be using their weapons, or planning to use their weapons, inappropriately. And by inappropriately I mean, “Kill people (and other things) that it’s illegal for them to kill.”

As a demonstration of just how much more responsible our current firearms holders are now, five years on from the mosque shooting, as I was writing this conclusion I received a push-notification for a news report of a second sea lion shot dead in Southland, with 50 pellets found inside her body on post-mortem. She was shot from behind, and was the mother of the pup shot and killed only weeks before.

Endangered and protected, sea lions face many natural threats in their own habitats and breed very slowly, making conservation of their species a real challenge. The unnecessary loss of a breeding female and her healthy baby is a serious threat to the local and global population, and it’s especially tragic because the New Zealand mainland is considered a ‘safe harbour’ for them against the dangers of the sub-antarctic ocean.

Just as we should have been safe for the 51 people martyred on March 15th.