There 240,000 or so licensed firearms owners in NZ, so there are a lot of different opinions amongst that population. And, contrary to how it often seems to be represented in media, we are not an organisation or lobby group. It's just simply a population of people who for one reason or another have a use for firearms in their work or sport.

It's really unfortunate that the American style association between shooting sports and right-wing "freedum" rednecks has been imported here - and I'm 100% certain that it has been deliberately exaggerated to make shooters easier to discredit. A lot of us have quite disparate political beliefs - shock horror, I know more than one person who hunts and also votes Green...

COLFO are doing their best to represent the concerns of licensed firearms owners, but as I say, we are a disparate group and not actually that easily represented. There are common themes, but it's not like we are some kind of organised lobby group. The themes I have seen are:

We don't like being scapegoated for the Christchurch tragedy. That wasn't us.
We don't appreciate our leisure/sports activities being taken away by people who don't understand them for political posturing.
We don't appreciate the massive increase in the cost and complexity of compliance that has been pushed on us, around things that were not causing any problems - particularly the increases in licensing costs, shooting range certification cost and complexity, and now the register (which is of course not free)
A lot of shooters don't really trust Police senior leadership. We don't trust them to manage our data properly, and we believe that they have shown through their past and present actions that they would prefer if civilian firearms ownership was completely banned.
We don't see the need for, or benefits of, a register of firearms. Yeah, I have seen the "It will keep the guns out of the hands of the gangs" arguments, but personally I don't believe much of it. I'm sure that some firearms have been transferred from licensed owners to gang members, but I don't believe that the bulk of their weapons are acquired that way. You're talking about people who smuggle meth into the country but you think they're not also bringing in guns? Like more interesting ones than the hunting rifles that you can buy at Hunting and Fishing?
We don't appreciate being represented in media as being unreasonable about all of these things by people who's total involvement in the issue is collecting soundbites. We don't appreciate COLFO and SSANZ being referred to as "The gun lobby" to make them seem like highly funded and media savvy PR experts - which they are not.

Licensed shooters are generally a responsible, law-abiding group - this much is guaranteed by the licensing process. We will probably just suck up this additional inconvenience and cost just like we have had to with all the other ones, because we have no choice and the public and media are not on our side.

But I think it's unreasonable for you to expect us to be happy about it.

[–] RaoulDuke 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I get where you're coming from. I live rurally, and while I don't have a gun myself, every one of my neighbours do. They're good people, and I'm not interested in waging a war on guns or anything. They're a necessary tool out here, for a bunch of reasons.

And I don't expect you guys will be happy about it. It sounds like a pain in the arse.

But I'll go back to the example of cars that the spokesman brought up. I'm not happy that I have to register my car. It's expensive and a pain in the arse. The vast majority of us registered drivers are good people, who don't at all represent the minority that endanger or hurt others. Besides, an awful lot of the worst behaviour is by people who've stolen the car or don't have a licence or registration.

But my car is something that can easily hurt or kill someone if I'm even slightly careless with it. I know I won't be, but I know others will be. And there will be many drivers, licensed or not, who deliberately commit crimes with cars. So we need some way to have accountability where we can, and the licence and registration system greatly improves that. The stolen cars, etc. make it an imperfect system that often fails to catch criminals, but it's a lot better than nothing. So it's a price I'm willing to pay to operate a lethal machine.

If you change cars to guns, it has the exact same logic. But guns are far more commonly used to commit very serious crimes than cars, despite being far less prevalent. So the incentive to have a system to track ownership is far greater.

If there weren't monsters like the mosque shooter - who was a registered gun owner - or criminals, we wouldn't need shit like this. But there are, so we do. There are so many rules in society that only exist because a small minority of people are arseholes. Car registration and gun registration are just those kinds of things. Especially because they can kill very easily. That's why I support the registration of both.

Edit to everyone else reading this thread: I'd love it if people didn't downvote comments just because you disagree with them. @bloop@lemmy.nz's comment, for example, is a reasonable and thoughful response. I think it's good to hear the other side and we should support them sharing their views here.

[–] bloop 2 points 1 year ago

I think I've responded to a lot of your points in the reply I posted to the other commenter, and I don't want to just spam the thread with my opinion over and over... But I did want to say thanks for creythe thread in the first place, and thanks for being chill about the topic. It's pretty hard to have a reasonable discussion about this kind of thing in a lot of places without lots of unnecessary name calling, so I appreciate your approach here :)

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