Hard News: When that awful thing happens
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Are you becoming my personal stalker, Islander?
What are you, twelve?
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Are You ?
nz native, I don't have the energy to respond in detail to your infantile insults. You know nothing about me, my background, or my life experiences.
You lost all credibility as soon as you started to throw insults. So please go away.
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Also, from what I remember of the "drug fraternity"? Not very fraternal. Just sayin'.
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And yet even in the UK, criminals don't.
That article is scary. With a population that's about 60% of NZ's, and under some of the most draconian firearms laws in the world, Manchester had over 3,000 incidents of firearms crime in 15 months and gunshots in an urban area were common.
NZ's laws are nowhere near as strict, we have no registration requirement (though given that pistols are gangs' weapons of choice that's not accurate either), and we have no real problem with firearms. Clearly registration isn't helping in the UK, and neither are harsh penalties for non-compliance. -
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The UK is a slightly different situation from NZ basically because of the porous border with mainland Europe.
It is relatively easy to buy and then smuggle ex-military weapons from Eastern Europe into the UK.
In this case, NZ's geographical isolation works in it's favour. However, I do not think it would be particularly difficult to smuggle weapons from, say, SE Asia into the country.
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we have no real problem with firearms
I think that's the point. For a country that is armed to the teeth, we still prefer to bludgeon, beat or stab our fellow citizens to death. We have a lot of guns, but we don't have a gun culture.
Sadly, boneheads like this Molenaar are going to crop up from time to time and cause havoc, but for the most part gun owners in this country are responsible and law abiding. I don't have any philosophical problems with requiring gun registration as well as owner licensing, but taking resources from other aspects of policing to police that would be counterproductive. -
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Smuggling weapons into NZ is a piece of cake. We have one of the largest EEZs on the planet, and thousands of kilometres of remote coastline. Customs has said many times that there's no way they can patrol the whole border and keep things from coming through.
Given that there's cocaine being smuggled in on Russian freighters, through NZ ports, firearms coming the same way are a given. It's just a matter of demand. The criminal element have no difficulty getting hold of firearms by stealing them, or buying them from people who have previously stolen them, so importation isn't a big need. Plus, of course, until a firearm gets seized by the police and they try and track its genesis, who's to know if it was imported legally or otherwise?
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I don't have any philosophical problems with requiring gun registration
Neither do I. My objections are entirely practical, and fiscal. I hate seeing taxpayer money wasted on exercises in futility, that have been demonstrated as futile in other countries. Politicians are meant to be beyond the stage of mental development that forces three-year-old children to touch the stove just to find out for themselves that it's hot, after watching their sibling get burned, but it appears that the ones running the country are still three and still have to fuck up for themselves. Privatised prisons, at a time when the rest of the world are moving away from them, for example.
Hopefully a registry will never be more than a wet dream of Alpers', but given the unwillingness to learn from foreign experience I'm yet to be convinced. -
Hand guns are the big killers in the UK and the US, not much of a problem here. Our isolation no doubt helps - I'm sure a black market Glock, if there is even such a thing here, would be cripplingly expensive. Perhaps that's why, apart from gun fetishists like Molenaar, we don't have the gun crime culture to the same extent as in the northern hemisphere. But the attitude to guns in this country helps - they are for shooting ducks and deer.
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Shay, pistols are a routine recovery during drug raids. And Molenaar wasn't using a handgun against the cops, he was using a rifle. Those are readily available, and modifying a semi-auto into a full-auto is a fairly minor engineering activity for someone with the right knowledge.
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having skillfully avoided any comment on my comment
What comment? I can't be bothered reading all your foamings..
let me ask you a question: have you any idea at all how many guns came into ANZ after the 2 major wars our service-people were involved in? Or the 3 (minor - only to those not involved) ones? You will note I own 2 heirloom guns: there are literally 1000s & 1000s of these weapons/tools out there - most held benignly.
Both my parents served in the forces, my mum during WW2 and my dad for most of the cold war. Neither of them felt any need to hoard illegal firearms afterwards.
There is *no* way your greatuncle is going to say, "O look, I've got a Luger in the roof. Bit of ammo too" and go through the legal hoops.It falls upon the families to do something about this sort of stuff after greatuncle has died.
Why not? Wander down to the cop shop and fill some forms? Or give the thing to a museum and have a nice plate with your dad's name on it? Isn't that better than risking a kid finding the gun and shooting his mate?
Registration of individual firearms does NOT work.
Repeated assertion does not a logical argument make. Why do almost all countries apart from NZ and the mad Americans have such a system?
And kindly dont tell registered gun-licenced owners how the system works. We do actually know, and rather despise your kind of comments.
You know, I find it really worrying that somebody who's allowed guns has such an attitude to democracy. For your reference, the way it works is that *everyone* is entitled to an opinion on what laws we have. And I'm just as likely to be shot by a crazed gun nut as anyone else, and would like the government to take appropriate countermeasures.
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I'm not disagreeing with you Matthew. Yes, handguns are recovered regularly, but the fact that so few people get shot suggests that crims are reluctant to use them - perhaps because they are so hard to come by. And semi-autos may well be readily available, but they don't get used often either.
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Repeated assertion does not a logical argument make. Why do almost all countries apart from NZ and the mad Americans have such a system?
And most of those countries have much higher rates of firearms crime than NZ, too. Higher rates of illegal ownership, higher rates of intentional firearms-related deaths, etc. Obviously registration is such a panacea.
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Steve Parks - I really thought the use of a Registry would be self evident as the comparison to cars was priviously stated by Alpers and so left it out to avoid repition.
I consider my evidence based arguement more persuasive than an opinion based one, but over to you.
Yeah I figured you thought it was self evident, hence my making the point you seemed to think it was self evident. I was asking for a counter to Matthew’s arguments that it is not such a good idea as it may seem. I consider Matthew’s arguments to be both evidence based and reasonable. (The evidence you cite seems to be his also: you cite the Mabey example, he points out that those guns were already registered.)
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I love coffee, occaisional cigars or a pipe (4-5 times a month); chocolate, single malts, & good wine. They're drugs. I'm sweet with that. And for those who enjoy a bit of cannabis now & then - why not.
Islander,
Then why not advocate for legalizing cannabis so that it has the same status as your drugs of choice? Why do you stop at decriminalization? -
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And in other news, Key has bought O'Connor's line about Tasers, right up to the little swivel thingee above the hook. The implication seems to be that Tasers would've resulted in different outcomes in the three police fatality cases in the last 12 months, which is unmitigated bullshit.
- A Taser's fuck-all use against a speeding car.
- A Taser's not going to be carried by someone who's doing covert ops. It's also not going to give you much chance against someone who's got a lethal "firearm."
- And the total lack of utility of Tasers in the Molenaar case has been done to death in this thread. -
possibly tangential, possibly not, but just WHAT does ev'rybody!(!) here make of the near quasi-deification of fallen policeman taking place throughout the MSM? "He was a hero every day he went to work" Yeeech!
Doesn't all of this do nothing so much as put an ever bigger premium, as it were, on the head of the next cop to cop it?
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Fair call, little p.
It would be a bit tough for them to come out with something like "He was a lazy bastard who always cut corners and he's no real loss to the force".
Also patently untrue, from what little I know about it. He sounds like he was "a good cop" rather than one of the bully-boys that bring the public image of the police down in the public estimation.(While I tend towards the opinion that a lot of cops are just bullies who like being in the gang that is supposedly 'on our side' I am happy to give credit to those who make it into and through the overly-macho us&them posturing and retain the dignity and positive attitude that allows the public to know that they are working for us.)
It sounds like Len Snee was 'one of the good ones'.
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make of the near quasi-deification of fallen policeman taking place throughout the MSM?
Isn't it just the near quasi-deification found at the funeral of any reasonably decent bloke? Somewhat (understandably) amplified by the nature of both his job and his death undertaking that job.
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well, plainly & maifestly it ain't the same as any halfway decent bloke! The MSM would appear to be wholly complict in ensuring that the send-of for this particular workforce member has all the impact of a state funeral or somesuch.. and re-presentation of the thing is relentless and unavoidable from north cape to bluff..
the pont at which an event becomes a sign is when it drags a whole series of events alomg in its train..
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I agree with all Mathew Poole has written on this post - well said.
With regards to Radio being the 'STAR' - keeping the story vibrant and real
This is absolute rubbish. Some of the comments/rumours on the radio were absolutely untrue. This caused a lot of concern/worry for people listening.
You should not let people go on air who are just repeating rumours. -
I didn't know Len Snee but I know many people who did - some of them knew Len very well.
By all accounts he was a fantastic man, extremely well liked and respected in the community. -
.................... speaking to a few friend about napier I'm
reliably told its a Mongrel Mob strong hold and to try dealing there you would have to be a very nut' ................ otherwise you'd get home invaded, smacked around, stood over and robbed.So it would appear in the real world where black and white cartoon characters just dont dont the job that there was actually a reason Jan had his arsenal ...............the enviroment he lived in.
What a shame that the police play their big part in creating such a dangerous enviroment in our towns.
Armed gang prospects doing home invasions on dealers ............. drug dealers tooling up and building stronghold's
Gangs fighting over turf ( in which you control the drugs )
Fuck .........sure sounds dangerous
Next thing you know little toddlers could get shot ...................
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My first sentance should have had the word HARD in it
speaking to a few friend about napier I'm
reliably told its a Mongrel Mob strong hold and to try dealing there you would have to be a very HARD nut' -
i myself must say that i am most intrigued by what 'nz native' has to say - but sir - if indeed i may call you sir - do we not here place a very large burden on the supposedlu simple concept of 'environment'?
But on the other hand we do not! For neighbourhood, locality, comparatively immediate scene & situation, is precisely what the word used to mean before 'twas hijack'd by Green ideologies in general and used to designate the entire planet (gasp)!
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