In case you’ve not seen it, yesterday Stuff “broke” the story that Brenton Tarrant was given a firearms licence without going through the required vetting – a breach of the Police’s own policy.
The March 15 terrorist was wrongly granted a firearms licence due to a string of police failures, sources have told Stuff.
The terrorist, who pleaded guilty to New Zealand’s worst mass shooting in March, was not properly inspected by police vetting staff when he applied for a firearms licence in 2017.
Stuff has been told that, among other errors, police failed to interview a family member as required, instead relying on two men who met the terrorist through an internet chatroom.
The error was overlooked when police granted him the firearms licence, allowing the Australian citizen to stockpile the semi-automatic guns later used to murder 51 people.
This is, of course, no surprise to readers of The BFD. We’ve known about this for quite some time and it was news shortly after the massacre.
The massacre was entirely preventable, had the Police followed proper vetting procedures.
This was also raised during the select committee process, and when it was raised Parliament pulled the video and suppressed the evidence. Again, The BFD wrote about this at the time.
The Police are directly culpable for the massacre. Perhaps that is why some senior folks are exiting before the Royal Commission reports back.
What is amusing is that Police have started leaking ever since Ron Mark rinsed Mike Clements for the role of commissioner because of Clements’ appalling attitude towards gun owners following the massacre.
Irrespective of when this precisely became news, it shows that gun owners have been right for years in saying the system was broken, and that they had lost confidence in the Police.
In light of this news and their systemic failure to properly administer the Arms Act, the Police should no longer be able to continue to administer firearms legislation. We need a new statutory body to administer the Act, with Police only being called upon to enforce the law. This would operate along the same lines as the NZTA and road transport administration.
The Police should properly be held to account for their failures in the lead up to the Christchurch massacre.
The new Police Commissioner is going to have to work very hard to regain the trust of firearms owners.