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Worzels World - Yet to hear an apology

 

Sufficient time has now passed since the Christchurch shooting incident for the metaphorical dust to have settled and a little cold-hearted rational analysis to be applied.

In the wake of this tragedy we have seen knee jerk legislation passed in record time and the temporary conversion to Islam of our Prime Minster. We have also seen the pushing of a censorship agenda in cahoots with other national leaders who are struggling to maintain power in their own immigrant-rich nations.

Following the Christchurch tragedy we were deluged by a tsunami of fake news branding the event a racist attack. This it could not have been. There were over half a dozen different races represented in the list of the deceased. The only common thread that bound everyone involved, including the gunman, was that they were not born and bred in New Zealand. This strangely correlates with New Zealand's only other recorded terrorist incident, the bombing and sinking of the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior. This too was the work of foreign nationals and the sole casualty was a visiting foreigner.

So far no-one has examined the large and somewhat obvious elephant in the room. However I will not ignore it. Instead I will climb upon it and beat it with a stick.

I have held a firearms licence for several decades. It was all so easy back in the old days when terrorists were mostly domiciled in Palestine or Northern Ireland and there was an absence of paranoia here in our mountainous Isles.

Two nights attending a ‘mountain safety’ course, a short test, and I was issued with a lifetime firearms license. The Government though can never be trusted to keep their word and like my lifetime drivers licence it turned out to be the lifetime of a dog rather than the lifetime of the licence holder.

For what they told us was greater safety, everything changed in the 1990s. A credit card-like photo licence was issued. Holders would be required to renew their licence every ten years. My original licence cost five bucks for a lifetime, the new one cost over a hundred for a decade. The process was, and still is, exhaustive and convoluted, and in cases where little or nothing of the licence holders circumstances have changed, as is the case with me, probably wasteful and unnecessary.

New Zealanders have absolutely no track record of terrorism, unless you include our state sponsored terrorists shooting up Afghani villages? And we mustn't forget regards this engagement that we were also lied to by our Government. Up until the Willie Apiata VC incident the public were still being fobbed off with the fiction that we were only there for ‘training purposes' and 'provincial reconstruction’. Trust the Government do ya? Yeah right. Yet a proven untrustworthy state sector has imposed an unwieldy vetting rigmarole on firearms users. 

So how then did a visiting foreign national obtain a firearms licence so easily? These more stringent checks didn't work and clearly illustrate that the rhetoric about more stringent checks was also misguided. I have yet to hear Government take any responsibility for allowing a homicidal maniac the lawful means to acquire firearms. Amongst all the emotionalism, sensationalism, prime ministerial photo ops, gratuitously clever headlines like 'They are Us’, I haven't yet heard an apology from any branch of Government for their failure. Mr Tarrant had only recently been training with the Israeli defence force. Surely this alone should have raised concerns that he was probably not acquiring firearms to commence a career in possum culling.

In the wake of the Christchurch shootings the current Government immediately embraced the flawed logic of blaming the tool rather than the workman. Banning certain types of firearms will achieve nothing. That all semi-automatic weapons will be handed in to the police for what I have heard is below market rate compensation is a pipe dream. There will still be such weapons out in the community. As always, good people don't need the law and bad people wont obey it. The law changes will simply drive such weapons onto the black market. 

The Adern Government has plans to spend over a million dollars of our money buying privately-owned firearms from law abiding citizens. So far the number of weapons handed in have been far less than what would be expected. Police Inspector Christopher McLennan advises that these firearms are destined to become scrap metal. He trots out the tired but surely now discredited excuse of greater safety for this gross waste. Even if these law changes succeeded in removing all semi-automatics from the population, the history of global terrorism proves that remote controlled bombs work better. These also increase the chances of the perpetrator avoiding detection so he, she or they can strike again another day. These types of crimes are not a gun related problem, they are a social problem. Banning Guns, hate speech, cyber terrorism or sponsoring sex change operations for transsexuals will not solve it. If you want a hint as to what works and what doesn't, simply compare the New Zealand of old which did not have these problems to the one of today that does, and work out what has changed.

God knows I've been writing about it for over a decade. It is not complicated, it is not impossible, it is not even that hard. I am not going to repeat myself except to say that a few things need to be reversed. We have in so many ways thrown the baby out with the bathwater. There may still be time to pick it up from the back yard, wrap it in a warm blanket and nurse it back to health. This though would require love, empathy a little bit of self-sacrifice and a large dose of common sense. What are the chances?

 Feedback? Email prof_worzel@hotmail.com

These types of crimes are not a gun related problem, they are a social problem.

 
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