Newsletter for December 2009

 

TV programme puts spotlight on police marksmanship and firearm safety.

 

A few weeks ago a short burst of media attention was focussed on the 1990 Aramoana incident as part of the build up for a TVNZ programme series about the AOS.

This included interviews with some of the original police team who shot and killed David Gray. Ex cop Tim Ashton, a member of this team admitted that while the AOS team fired a total of 11 shots at a range of about FOUR metres (or only about 14 feet) only four actually hit their target. (SSANZ comment -And of those four hits only one would have been fatal.) In short, the remaining seven shots missed and were never properly accounted for.

 

We have subsequently been told unofficially that police actually surrounded the house (which by then was on fire) and that one officer was wounded in an ankle, while another was hit by a ricocheting 9 mm bullet –both injuries very likely due to “friendly fire”.

 

Yet the same Mr Tim Ashton was also quoted as saying that, in his opinion NZ's gun laws are still much too lax, that he doesn’t see the need for anyone who is not a police officer or in the army to have a pistol or a semi-automatic rifle and that the hunting rifles that members of the public should "be allowed” to possess should be limited to two shots.

 

So, on the one hand Ashton admits to a pathetically poor collective level of marksmanship from his AOS team, then has the gall to argue that we would be better off being disarmed and placed under their “protection”. Thanks but no thanks!

 

Such arrogance from ex-cops who still clearly think of themselves as having the right to tell the rest of us what our rights should be is of course nothing new. Too many police officers (especially those from the UK) subscribe to the flawed logic that the rights the police and the State should allow ordinary citizens should be set not by the behaviour of the vast majority of law-abiding prudent and hard-working citizens but by the actions of the very criminal and deranged minority that the police are clearly unable- or unwilling -to control.

 

Yet all police officers are taught police fire orders (or F1 as they're known in cop code). These state they can shoot "only if they fear death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others". What Ashton and others like him choose to ignore is that this is precisely what is set out in S48 of the crimes act to justify the use of self-defence by ordinary citizens.

 

Given the documented poor marksmanship at Aramoana it would seem that the shooting by police earlier this year of an innocent 17 year old courier driver on Auckland’s north western motorway is not quite the “1 in a million, totally unavoidable accident” that police hierarchy claim. What is very clear is that the level of police marksmanship and the ability of police to handle firearms safely to the minimum level demanded from every firearms licence holder has not improved at all over the last 19 years. A proper level of public scrutiny and accountability would appear long overdue.

 

Canadian MP’s vote to end gun registry sends a message to New Zealand.

 

It is important to remember that this is the very Canadian gun registry that Sir Thomas Thorp's Report held up as the "successful" model for NZ to copy.

 

Most shooters also now know this gun registry has been an ultra-expensive failure that has cost the Canadian taxpayer close to 3 billion Canadian dollars to date and contributed directly to the defeat of the previous Liberal government at the last election. Additionally, its true cost will probably never be accurately known as the previous government attempted to hide the true spend from government auditors and thus Canadian taxpayers. Political pressure to abolish this failed 14 year old gun registration system has therefore been mounting for some time.

 

In early November MPs voted 164-137 in favour of C-391, a private member's bill to abolish the 14-year-old registry, the bill passing with the support of 21 opposition MPs. The vote means the bill has the approval in principle of the House and will now go to committee for further study before a third vote allows it to go to the Senate for final approval.

 

The gun registry issue is nevertheless still causing deep divisions within the Liberal party who originally passed it into law, with eight Liberal MP’s crossing the floor to vote against their party leadership. This forced Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to acknowledge that the controversial registry has failed to garner "legitimacy" in rural Canada.

 

Unfortunately Ignatieff’s only “solution” is more tinkering with gun registration-something that is clearly never ever going to work. His claim that the gun registry is a “valuable police tool” and “is consulted 9,000 times a day by police” is also deliberately misleading since the police information gathering system is set up so that ANY request for information automatically generates a gun registry request, whether the police officer wants this or not.

SSANZ believes the NZ taxpayer has had a lucky escape, as the Canadian registration system was precisely what Sir Thomas Thorp had recommended. Had it not been for the large numbers of ordinary shooters who gave the politicians wanting to rubber-stamp the Thorp Report into NZ law the reality check they needed, we would have been in the same position as the Canadians-and having to meet the same astronomically inflated costs!

Then again, since Thorp got it so totally wrong why can’t he be made to refund his near million dollar fee?

From our UK Watch;

Ex-Soldier faces jail for handing in gun

Paul Clarke, a 27 year old former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun he found in his garden in to Surrey police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty". The jury took just 20 minutes to convict and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five years imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

 

In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested. "I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.

 

On handing the gun into police Mr Clarke was arrested immediately for possession of a firearm and taken to the cells. This is in spite of the fact police have never explained to the public just what they need to do to avoid arrest if they find a gun.

 

Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge "The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant."

 

Mr Clarke will be sentenced on December 11^th.

 

 

SSANZ Comment;

There are times when words just fail us. The case is unusual in as much as it shows perfectly what happens when repressive laws and low IQ policing meet. No wonder the police in the UK have lost virtually all respect and support from the general public and no wonder violent crime (including gun crime) continues to rise there.

 

Interestingly, the recent UK report by Denis O’Connor (the UK’s Chief Inspector of Police) concluded that British policing has “lost its way” amid the “noise and clutter of government targets, initiatives and new laws and that forces have “drifted away” from the core basics of front-line policing and serving the public. He would not get any argument from us on that score. He could also very profitably start his reforms with Surrey Police.

 

It is very interesting to also read that Mr O’Connor is now calling for a return to the ideals defined by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, of which the most important was “the police are the public and the public are the police”. This is something SSANZ believes is long overdue and would be keen to see.

 

It’s a pity Mr O’Connor cannot be invited to New Zealand to have a look at our police, at the power-police attitudes within our present police hierarchy and at the culturally unacceptable anti gun attitudes found among a significant number of police officers in NZ. Especially, it seems, among those originally from the UK who often appear to have brought the very attitudes Mr O’Conner is now critical of with them to NZ.

 

 

Fort Hood massacre-Update

Many of us must have wondered how a mass shooting could ever happen at a busy US army base. It would intuitively appear to be one of the least likely places for such an event to occur. Until that is, you realise that every Home US army base was de-facto turned into a Gun Free zone by a 1993 Clinton gun law that disarmed US soldiers by forbidding them to carry personal weapons while at the same time making it almost impossible for commanders to issue army firearms to soldiers in the US for self defence.

Only military police carry firearms on base, and just like with civilian police, there are never enough of them to guarantee safety. Mr Clinton’s gun law in effect made attacking a US Army base a safer option for a terrorist than attacking a Texas Wal-Mart store.

As an editorial in the Washington Times of November 11^th 2009 put it;

“Most people understand that guns deter criminals. Research also shows that the presence of more guns limits the damage mass murderers can unleash. A major factor in determining how many people are harmed by these killers is the time that elapses between the launch of an attack and when someone - soldier, civilian or law enforcement - arrives on the scene with a gun to end the attack.”

 

“All the public shootings in the United States in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where concealed handguns have been banned.”

 

Our case against gun control rests. Put another way, the thirteen killed at Fort Hood were simply more victims of gun-control laws. Like those in Mumbai, at Virginia Tech, etc, etc etc.

 

 

Why the anti-gun lobby won’t get much mileage out of Washington State Cop killings.

 

The man suspected of killing four police officers in a coffee bar in Lakewood, Washington State, was known from court documents to be delusional and mentally unstable. The suspect, Maurice Clemmons (37, and now deceased) has (or rather had) an extensive criminal past.

 

He was sentenced in 1989 to 95 years in jail for aggravated robbery and other crimes at the age of 17. However, in 2000 he was paroled by then Arkansas governor (and later Republican presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee. After release he quickly violated his parole and was back in jail in July 2000, being release again in March 2004.

 

After moving to Washington State, Clemmons had recently been re-arrested for a third-degree assault on a police officer and for the rape of a child. Yet in spite of this prior history of serious violence, he was released on bail -with tragic results.

 

SSANZ comment;

Anyone who still believes that the “cause” of such violent incidents is a lack of gun laws are themselves delusional and mentally unstable We believe the real cause is the ideologically corrupted and incompetent way in which mental health services, courts, prison and parole services now operate, assisted in their turn by politicians prepared to deceive the public.

 

While this is an example from the US, the situation is no better here in NZ, which operates a virtually identical revolving door mental health and prison/parole system, all with the tacit approval of senior politicians from almost every political party. Until this changes, nothing else can.

 

What is crystal clear from this case is that had Governor Huckabee not granted Clemmons parole, had the mental health system actually provided effective treatment and ultimately, if bail had not been granted after his recent arrest then four police officers would still be alive.

 

The bleeding heart liberals that invariably make up the anti-gun lobby and have for years set the agenda for mental health and justice/prison/parole services both here and in the US will of course be outraged at such a return to reality. Let them be. It’s time we threw their own words back at them-“ if it only saves one life….”