Thread: Feeling sick after reading this !

[QUOTE=Seventenths;1401024]Most firearms reported stolen aren’t reported with their serial numbers as the owners don’t know or don’t keep records of the serial numbers. How many people honestly keep a record of all their property which has serial numbers… very, very few!

A good point - I have put on my weekend list the task of setting up a spreadsheet and adding the new guns in with numbers

Re this point
Yes it could go both ways. It may actually prove that the majority of criminal firearms do not come LFAOs.

If you think about it there are two sources of firearms from LFAOs, those who willingly onsell to the likes of gangs, and those whos firearms are stolen.

In the onselling situation as firearms sales are now recorded, those firearms are traceable and as we have seen over the last couple of years that leads to those selling them being prosecuted. But there have been less than a handful of cases indicating this is not widespread.

With regards to the stolen firearms, most LFAOs will report stolen firearms (at the very least for insurance claims if nothing else). We have never seen police put out stats around recovered stolen firearms - and you can guarantee if these were showing a correlation the police would've published the numbers. But at the end of the day a register is not going change this if it was a source of firearms for crims anyway.

What will be interesting is after 1 year doing an OIA for recovered firearms statistics, e.g. how many stolen firearms were recovered and traceable in the register. In fact it may be more revealing about how effective the police are, and potentially customs (e.g. if they start recovering firearms that have no NZ 'trail' of ownership).

As LFAOs there is an opportunity here to use the register to prove what we are saying, to reveal the truths and shut down the lies. It's coming whether we like or not, so lets make the best of it.

I understand the idea but do not accept that a registry will be better as it is my belief that registration will, like the confiscations, cause more firearms to go "dark"

I believe that when faced with the prospect of registering and especially if this new authority show any sign of charging more for how many rifles you have, good ol' kiwi tightness will kick in and people won't register large proportions of what they have
Also factoring in laziness/inertia it is my belief that a lot of people don't keep up with govt legislation and largely don't care so just won't bother

If a register does become law (and I will fight it tooth and nail) then there has got to be a way to get dark guns onto the register which is smooth, easy and with little cost or consequence to the person bringing them in to the fold or people just won't bother and we will end up with a situation where people have got unregistered guns that cost them say x amount of dollars, the cops will say you can hand it in and we will destroy it but we'll prosecute you if you don't so there will be some people who look at it as 'well the cops will give me nothing and the mongrel mob will give me 2 grand so fuck it'

I could well be wrong but I have a bad feeling that we are going to find out...