Fit and proper
For months, I’ve been working on a piece about firearms, and I need to thank my paid subscribers especially for giving me the space and grace to do it. I thought the piece would be straightforward - more fool me - but I hope that when I finally deliver, readers will be as fascinated by the stories as I am.
The problem with the topic of firearms is that it’s just so big. I keep tumbling down rabbit holes to find sordid motives and dodgy people (not individual gun owners, who are sensible more often than not, but the gun lobby). I can’t cram every rabbit hole into my eventual piece, but I don’t want to lose them either.
Here’s one rabbit hole I think is important. It’s a bit twisty, so bear with me. We need to start with two bits of context.
The first bit of context is this. There are deep interconnections between Aotearoa’s figures on the fringes of the right. I’ve written about this stuff before.1 You will find these folks attending each other’s events, sitting on the boards of each other’s tinpot organisations, and boosting each other’s posts.
The second bit of context is a short history lesson. Until the reforms that followed the Christchurch terror attack of 15 March 2019, gun laws in Aotearoa didn’t track guns themselves. There was no way of knowing who owned what guns, or how many - and in the Christchurch terrorist’s case, no one in authority knew he’d amassed a whole arsenal. Instead of tracking guns, our laws focused on owners and rested on licensing. Once a person got a license, the door was open. They could pretty much buy all the guns and parts and ammunition they liked, so long as these weren’t illegal.
One of the reforms after 15 March 2019 was to introduce a gun registry where gun owners have to record their firearms, allowing the authorities to track which gun owners hold what. The registry is bitterly opposed by the Council of Licenced Firearms Owners, or COLFO, who are the loudest voice in Aotearoa’s gun lobby. COLFO longs for the ‘good old days’ when you got your gun license and you were good to go. They think gun licensing provides all the checks and balances the system needs, and anything more stringent is just picking on gun owners.
And how does a person get a gun license? You need to prove you’re a ‘fit and proper person’ - a version of a test that’s applied to people in all sorts of areas, from teachers through to bus drivers. In the gun license context, being a fit and proper person means things like not having a prohibition order against you for family violence, not having a conviction for various imprisonable crimes, and not having a drug or alcohol problem so bad it affects your judgement or behaviour. Being fit and proper also means not showing ‘patterns of behaviour demonstrating a tendency to exhibit, encourage, or promote violence, hatred, or extremism’.2
If you ask COLFO what went wrong that allowed the Christchurch terrorist to kill fifty-one people and injure forty more, they’re unequivocal. It was nothing to do with gun availability, they’ll tell you - not even the availability of military-style semi-automatics. They give an explanation that’s true but insufficient: when the police vetted the Christchurch terrorist for his gun license, they messed up.3 Police took character references from a couple of people who barely knew the terrorist (his ‘gaming friend’ and the gaming friend’s parent), and gave him a license on this basis.4 If the terrorist hadn’t passed the fit and proper person test, he wouldn’t have got a license - and if he didn’t have a license, he wouldn’t have committed the worst act of mass violence in our country’s history. So COLFO reckons. Easy.
OK, that’s the end of our history lesson. We’ve finally arrived at the fit and proper person test. We’re fairly unconvinced by COLFO’s weak logic, but for the sake of argument, let’s run with it a bit further. If you genuinely believed that the fit and proper person test was the key to avoiding 15 March 2019, and any future events like it, you’d go all out to support it, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?
A quick scoot through COLFO’s media releases shows a steady drip-drip-drip of attempts to weaken the fit and proper person test. Trying to reduce the discretion of police during vetting, so officers can’t use their judgement.5 Publicly emphasising the lack of trust in police by some gun license owners experiencing mental health challenges - a troubling stance, because owners whose mental health means they’re not safe with guns are required to tell Te Tari Pūreke, the Firearms Licensing Authority run by police.6 Complaining, after the police actually did start applying the fit and proper person test more stringently, that it was resulting in license suspensions - kind of the point.7
OK, you say. You sigh, but you’re not surprised. You weren’t really looking to the gun lobby for moral leadership on these issues. But we’re not done.
I want to come back to the point I made earlier, about the interconnections between Aotearoa’s figures on the fringes of the right.
COLFO offers its members discounted legal support, as follows:
Should you find your status as a 'fit and proper' person, and license status being challenged the right legal support is critical. COLFO recommends the following lawyers who are experts in firearms law.8
In fairness, any exercise of power by government needs checks and balances, and lawyers have a legitimate role. But I also want to repeat what I said before: when people fail the fit and proper person test, it’s for reasons like family violence or an imprisonable crime, or having a very severe drug and alcohol problem. Or it’s because they promote violence, hatred, or extremism. This isn’t petty stuff.
One of the discount-offering law firms COLFO directs people to is Franks Ogilvie. The founder and co-owner of Franks Ogilvie is Stephen Franks, an ACT MP from 1999 to 2005. Now, Franks Ogilvie, and Franks himself, can take on the clients they please. Entering into an arrangement with COLFO could be seen more as a political gesture - but for the sake of argument, let’s be generous. Law firms have to work with clients. The lawyer that specialises in working with, say, fraudsters isn’t endorsing fraud. Maybe this situation is no different.
But Stephen Franks has all sorts of side gigs. He writes for the Taxpayer’s Union, who amongst other things was recently forced to apologise for publishing brazenly untrue stories targeting the partner of a Labour MP - claiming she’d travelled overseas and been given a car with tax funds. And Franks is a commentator on The Platform, hosted by Sean Plunket, who was suspended from Twitter for doing what I thought was impossible - actually falling below Twitter’s hateful conduct standards.9
Franks is also on the board of the Free Speech Union. In a recent newsletter, the FSU proudly took up the cause of one of their members. In the FSU’s telling, the member had been threatened with being ‘debanked’ for providing this customer feedback to Kiwibank, slightly edited because it disgusts me:
Great staff. Horrid woke bank. Your ambassador recently was the violent woke [racial group] dumbo who is suffering acute mental issues and does not know his sex.
Like I said, a law firm’s job is to represent clients. But everybody, lawyer or otherwise, has a choice who they spend time with outside of work: normal people, or people who publish untruths about political opponents’ partners, who violate hateful conduct standards, or who defend someone’s right to abuse a worker for their race and gender. When someone keeps company like that, you’d be entitled to ask how they, personally, define a fit and proper person - and just how low someone would have to stoop to fail to meet that definition.
The people who read COLFO’s website - who want to weaken the fit and proper person test, or take legal action because they’ve failed the test themselves - have access to all the same information as the rest of us. They can see the connections between figures on the fringes of the right, the denialism of the role of lax gun laws in 15 March 2019, the delight in attacking political opponents, the hateful conduct, and the racial and gender abuse.
They read what we read. The difference is these people are angrier than you and I, and they either have guns or want them. And there’s a sordid cottage industry emerging, devoted to stoking their anger.
It’s no coincidence that the gun lobby has links with those who argue gleefully against basic human decency, in words or in deeds or in law.
Fit and proper, my arse.
Thanks Anna for this. A number of years ago, I met with a group of managers at a major tourism destination to discuss reports that one of their employees at an isolated site had developed an unhealthy obessession with guns, to the point where one of his 'fit and proper' referees had approached the police to withdraw his reference. The employee was able to get a replacement referee, so no action was taken by the police. During the meeting, a senior manager said that at a staff meeting the day before I arrived, the managers had discussed their own gun ownership, and he was shocked to realise that between the five of them, they owned 67 guns. The managers acknowledged the problems that I was raising, but because the police felt no need to act, they didn't think they could either, at least not because of his behaviour around guns. But as the employee's mental health continued to deteriorate (he stopped washing) they found a way to terminate his employment. Please keep on with this research and writing, I agree that if we don't fight any attempts to loosen gun regulations the future could look very frightening.
I honestly think the propensity to violence as a requirement for denial of fit and proper person, should only be a starting point.
I feel that any of many other crimes and red flags should be considered. Fraud, for example. Anything that points to a willingness to subvert the system ought to be grounds for refusal.
We know, for example criminals often use straw buyers to supply them with firearms.