Nash StuartARMS (PROHIBITED FIREARMS MAGAZINES AND PARTS) AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to principal ActHon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): Thank you very much Mr Chairman. This is a bill that puts in place the Prime Minister's promise made two days after the terror massacre on 15 March that killed 50 Kiwis and put another 50 Kiwis in hospital. At that point in time the Prime Minister stood up and said to the nation Our gun laws will change." That was 26 days ago. What happened during that time was Parliament came together. Every single MP except one acknowledged that things needed to change and this is incredible. I read something from the Minister of Police in the 1990s the Hon John Banks after the Aramoana massacre when he said he tried to get this form of legislation through and he couldn't. He said it was the greatest political regret from the 1990s. The former Prime Minister Helen Clark said the same. So I'm so proud that as a Parliament we can come together put politics aside and do the right thing for this country. It is easy to stand up and say we are going to ban assault weapons and military-style semi-automatics but putting this in place is in fact a lot more difficult. What we decided on when we looked at this was basically a risk-based approach. There were a number of models we could have looked at. We could have looked at the Australian model after Port Arthur. What they did was they banned all semi-automatics and then they put an exemption regime in place. We decided it was probably best to determine (a) where the risk lay but also (b) what are the sorts of weapons that are used as tools of the trade by men and women throughout our communities and (c) what the weapons are that are used for recreation by many many men and women throughout our country. That's why we decided to exempt .22 rimfire semi-automatics that have a cartridge of 10 or fewer. The reason for this is we acknowledged that there are many farmers up and down this country that use .22s for pest control for hunting and for just doing what farmers do on their farms so we decided to exempt that. In Australia they didn't exempt that and let me give you an example: in New South Wales alone there were over 16000 exemptions granted for permits to procure a semi-automatic. We thought it was easier to go down the other way. We looked at shotguns. We know that duck hunting is a sport undertaken by around about—well I'm told—100000 Kiwis. A substantial number of Kiwis go duck hunting and the weapons they use are shotguns with internal magazines. The weapon that the terrorist used had an external magazine. So what we said—we took a pragmatic view of this—is we decided to exempt a shotgun with an internal tubular magazine with five shots or fewer because this was a major tool for recreational duck hunters and we thought it was easier to exempt that. The police also said that when they're facing guns when they're out there wearing their body armour and keeping us safe those are not the guns that are presented to them. So we thought "Let's exempt those." but everything else—every other semi-automatic—we thought was rid of this country. Now let me just put something into perspective. The weapon that the terrorist used was called an AR-15. The AR-15 is the civilian equivalent of the M16. The M16 is the weapon that the ground troops in Vietnam used. This is a weapon that was specifically designed to kill people. It's not for deer hunting. You don't shoot ducks with it you don't shoot rabbits with it; you kill people with it. We don't need these guns in our communities. There are a number of other AK weapons that you used to be able to buy—you can't now—with your stock standard licence but then the glaring loophole was you could go out without any licence and buy a magazine that took 30 shots. Then what you could do is you could put that into your AR-15—by the way you contravened the Arms Act at the point you did that. You put it in there and you had a killing machine—you had a weapon that was designed to kill a lot of people quickly. This was a massive loophole in our arms legislation. We know we needed to close this down and everyone came behind us—thank you to the National Party New Zealand First the Greens and of course Labour. This is the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do and I'm very proud to be part of it."