A Sensible Shooters Solution to Firearms Licensing

When does your driver’s licence expire? Imagine if the advice you were given was that, if at any point during the application renewal process your existing driver’s licence expired before you had received your new driver’s licence, you would not be able to lawfully drive.

Thankfully that is not the case, as driver licensing is done by the NZTA, which is an independent body spun off from Police, who used to look after licensing.

This advice however does apply to firearms owners.

If at any point during the application renewal process your existing licence expires before you have received your new licence, you will not be able to lawfully possess or use your firearms and ammunition (unless you are under the immediate supervision of a valid firearms licence holder).

Once again firearms owners are poorly served by the not so independent firearms authority regarding licensing. However, in this recent letter, the blame was placed at the feet of COVID.

With more uncertainty and likely impacts due to COVID-19 Omicron in the community, all holders with licences due to expire at any time in 2022 are advised to apply for a licence renewal now.

Is COVID really the problem? There are many instances of licence delays with firearms holders applying for licences 6 months or more before expiry and still not receiving their renewed licence before their existing licence expires.

Sensible Shooters would accept that there is a small influence of COVID, but these licensing delays existed before COVID. 

Sensible Shooters knows that local Arms Officers and vetters are doing an excellent job but there are real issues with the paperwork required for firearms licences: 35 plus pages to fill out. Yes, 35! 

This overreaction was brought in after 2019 so the police could say they had tightened licence requirements. Feedback from local Arms Officers is that the amount of paperwork is overwhelming and there is very little extra resource as the Kapiti office sucks up all the money and resources. Yet another bureaucratic empire being built.

Sensible Shooters trust the good instincts and the local knowledge of the local Arms Officers and their vetters to sniff out issues; something that 35 or more pages of paperwork would never do. Given the vetters are on the case, visiting people at home, seeing and talking to the family, is the 35-page firearms licence form really necessary?  

One of the issues that the setting up of an independent firearms authority was to be tasked with was licensing. If drivers’ licences can be done in a matter of weeks, and you get a temporary licence chit while you are waiting, then the same can be done with firearms licences.

It is nonsense for Police to say that it can take many months for a firearms licence to be processed. The new, not so independent, firearms authority is failing before it even begins with the licensing issues as Police national headquarters’s negative attitude towards firearms owners continues.

It is worthwhile noting that this is yet another fail for the firearms owners’ consultation groups (like FCAF) that the police run. These groups, despite including a range of firearms owners, have achieved NOTHING to help firearms owners work through the licensing delays.

Firearms owners are left with this Police advice:

During this time [when your license has expired, before you get your new one], you should give your firearms and ammunition to a current firearms licence holder to store appropriately on your behalf, until your firearms licence renewal application is approved.

From a recent letter advising of firearms licensing delays

This advice is bordering on the ridiculous. Collectors of firearms may have many items that are on the collectors’ police register. This means that, as an example, each of the 92 collector’s items that a certain collector may have, needs a permit to transfer. Each one of those permits needs to be processed by the local arms officer, then each of those items is taken off that collector’s licence and added to another collector’s licence by the local arms officer. Then behold! A new licence arrives and the whole process goes on again in reverse!

This piece of Police advice above is a mind-bogglingly inefficient waste of time and resources, not to mention the very real chance of security issues and mistakes (eg serial number transpositions).

And of course, the punch line is, this will happen for every firearms owner when all firearms need to be registered.

Firearms licensing is a mess, and the blame is squarely laid on Kapiti, NOT with the local Arms Officers.

To see how messy firearms licensing is, take the case of firearms dealers’ licences. They are renewed annually and there are also similar delays of many months between when a dealer’s firearms license expires and the new one arrives. Police do not have the same advice for dealers – they carry on with expired licences; otherwise many gunshops and other firearms dealers would have to shut their doors and cease to operate.

Firearms owners whose licences are about to expire, while they are waiting for their new licence, should approach their local arms officer to place their firearms and ammunition at the local police station for safe storage until their new licence arrives as this may be the only safe and legal option for firearms owners that have a number of items.

Of course, the Sensible Shooters solution would be to issue every firearms licence holder who is going for renewal with a temporary chit that allows the holder to keep and shoot their own firearms. How difficult would that be?