Hugh Devereux Mack: Spokesperson for The Council of Licensed Firearm Owners on the public consultation of the Arms Act

Public consultation on the rewrite of the Arms Act opens today.

It has been more than 40 years since the Act was enacted, with lobby groups calling the legal firearm system fractured and confused.

What are firearms owners hoping to achieve with the public consultation? 

Spokesperson for The Council of Licensed Firearm Owners Hugh Devereux Mack joins the show to discuss what the government needs to consider, and how this compares to the previous consultation of the Act. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
Public consultation on the Rewright of the Arms Act opens today.
It's been more than forty years since the Act was enacted,
with lobby groups calling the legal firearms such system fractured
and confused. Hugh devro Mac is the spokesperson for the
Council of Licensed Firearm Owners and he's with me now.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Hugh, good morning, good morning, pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, what needs fixing.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Look, there's a number of things that need fixing, but
the key one is people need to remember. These laws
that are being rewritten, or are proposed to be rewritten,
govern how law abiding people use and access firearms. But
police and previous governments under Labor saw these changes to
the legal system as a way to sort of restrict
criminals accessing using guns, which is silly when you consider

(01:02):
being a criminal means you ignore the law in the
first place. So what essentially has been brought in is
a lot of different rules that make it very difficult
for regular people to understand the laws. There's around seven
different areas that govern what we can do with our
legal firearms, and it's very challenging for us to actually
obey in falling compliance with these. Even police themselves get

(01:24):
it wrong when they're trying to administer it. So cleaning
it up, I think is a really good step for.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Everyone, and simplifying it I guess, is it Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Absolutely, it should be easy to be a law abiding person.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
What's the biggest challenge we have with firearms in New Zealand?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
So the biggest challenge I think we five with firearms
is well, when I talk to people on the street,
they say the problem is gangs with guns. It's never
licensed firearms owners who are committing these serious crimes and
harming communities. And yet we're the ones who are often
the ones focused by legal changes. So I think if
we can first off, separate the police powers from taking

(02:01):
them away from the regulation and the law writing process
and instead allow them to do what our officers do well,
and that's go after criminals use firearms to do harm
and leave the legislation process to those who are really
good at it, like Justice or DIA or another agency.
I think that'll be a really good start. But first off,
we need to start tackling criminals who use guns to
do harm.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Can it any thing that they we see through this
consultation process lead to something the government can do that
will make a difference to the illegal firearms.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah, I think there are a few things that we
can do. One is a as I said, we need
to make it easy for people to get their firearms
license once they go through the regular and well sort
of vetted an established process. It's not easy to get
a gun license in New Zealand. There are background checks,
medical record checks, consultations with people who know you quite

(02:53):
well for character references, security testing, so that's all quite
well established. I think there are some people who have chosen,
as a result of law changes in twenty nineteen to
go unlicensed because the pathways to getting a license were narrowed.
That's quite a complex topic we could probably talk about
another time, but I think if primarily we make it

(03:15):
simple for regular law abiding people to get their license,
that would at least cut down the number of unregistered
criminals who are using guns just through sort of I
guess being lazy about the system or not wanting to
engage when it comes to the guns themselves that the
gangs and things are using. The cracking down on straw
buyers has been a big focus of the Firearms Register. However,

(03:39):
most of the times that have been caught recently were
used or caught using good old police tactics, without the
need for the new firearms Register, which has already got
errors throughout it. So I think allowing police to focus
on catching criminals allowing the justice system to prosecute them.
There are things we could do. If you own a

(04:00):
firearm that has the register the registry number removed, perhaps
that is an aggravating factor and sent some thing because
no legal owner of guns should ever have deliberately removed
their IM series. I think that would be a fair
step that most farm's owners would support.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Good stuff. Hey, Hugh, thanks so much for your time.
That is Hugh Devreau Mack. He's the spokesperson for the
Council of Licensed Firearm Owners.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
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