Some of New Zealand's earliest firearms legislation referred to cutlasses, pikes, "warlike stores" and the legality of keeping "10 pounds weight of gunpowder".
Politicians are grappling with updating New Zealand's current legislation following the Christchurch terror attack. The discussion is now about military style semi-automatics, high capacity magazines, licence endorsements and vetting applicants.
New Zealand's firearms control began with the Arms Ordinance of 1845, according to an appraisal of the 1997 Review of Firearms Control.
The Arms Act 1860 was the later legislation that referred to "warlike stores" and keeping gunpowder.
But Auckland lawyer Nicholas Taylor, who specialises in gun laws - said the first "big" firearms legislation was introduced in 1908, followed by more in 1920 and then 1958.
"All those ones can be summed up relatively quickly. As far as those acts - they basically focused on control of importation of firearms into New Zealand, especially pistols or what we call machine guns or automatic guns, controlling those. It also made people get a certificate ... so that every firearm was registered with police that was in New Zealand up until and including 1958," Mr Taylor said.
"That really sums up the situation. If someone wanted a firearm they could go down and apply at the police station for a certificate and they would take that certificate over and pick up the firearm, take the firearm back to the police station and police would record it into a big book. And that's the way it was. Nothing really about the person would be recorded. It would be the gun that was recorded."
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/38...
Posted By: Steve Williams
Wednesday, March 20th 2019 at 12:38PM
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