The proposed law that introduces the country's next tranche of firearm reforms has passed its first reading unanimously in Parliament on Wednesday evening.
Labour, National, the Greens, ACT, and Te Pāti Māori voted in favour of the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill.
The proposed law aimed to ban adults who have been convicted of serious offences from accessing, using, being around, or possessing a firearm or ammunition.
Offenders also wouldn’t be allowed to visit or live in places where there are firearms, or associate with a person who has them. Under the bill, it would be a crime to knowingly supply firearms to someone under a prohibition order.
Once a firearm prohibition order was issued against a person, it would be in place for 10 years. If a person was imprisoned, they wouldn’t be allowed to access firearms for a decade after their release. The person would not be able to hold a firearms license during that time.
Police Minister Poto Williams said the Government was committed to reducing firearms violence.
“It is a privilege and not a right to own or use a gun in this country. Those that maintain a risk of recidivism back into serious crime need to be excluded from a key means of perpetrating their criminal violence, coercion and control.”
Williams said it gave police a new way to keep guns out of offenders’ hands.
The bill comes after another tranche of the Government’s firearm reforms came into force on February 1.
Those rules, which were part of the Arms Amendment Regulations Act passed last year, included better oversight of dealer activities, stronger rules for firearm storage during transport, and tightening licence vetting requirements.
Other changes the Government had introduced included a dedicated firearms unit within police, which would take over regulatory activities from December this year, and a firearms registry from June 2023.
The laws were made in response to recommendations made by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, in which a terrorist killed 51 people and injured dozens more.
ACT leader David Seymour said he supported the bill because it was of higher quality than the Government’s previous firearms control reforms, which were a “knee-jerk” reaction to the terror attack.
“It is actually being done with due progress … this piece of legislation has been done with prior consultation before being introduced, it’s been debated in the house now, it’s going to be referred to the Justice [Select] Committee I would hope … for a full six-month consultation.”
He also commended the bill for wanting to regulate the types of people holding the guns, rather than the type of firearms itself, as the Government had done by banning most military-style assault weapons in 2019.
Meanwhile, National’s Paul Goldsmith said the legislation “will hopefully make it harder for some of our most hardened criminals in this country to get access to firearms and will give police more powers to deal with those people”.
“It will make a small difference. It’s not going to solve all of the problems. It will certainly not stop some of the most dangerous criminals getting a hold of firearms … hopefully, more of them will get caught and punished for doing it, but it’s not going to solve all the problems on its own.”
In conjunction with the bill, the Government also needed to make progress on the deep-rooted causes of crime, Goldsmith said.
He said this included creating a crime prevention strategy and addressing housing shortages.
The Green Party’s Golriz Ghahraman said it was important to keep the victims of the Christchurch terror attack at the forefront of lawmaking when it came to firearms reforms.
“It should have never have come to a tragedy like that, with the extent of the loss of life, for this House of Representatives for successive Governments to react and look at our very lax gun laws.”
Police data revealed that while the number of firearms offences has risen and fallen over the past 15 years, 2021 was the worst over that period with 1308 firearms offences recorded.
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