Andrew Dickens Afternoons

I presume the lead story in the Herald on Sunday was welcomed by police and those behind our stronger gun laws.   An Auckland pensioner and his daughter have been caught for legally buying 13 guns for the Comancheros motorcycle gang.   It's the latest of dozens of discoveries by police of licensed gun owners buying for gangs who cannot legally purchase guns.   It was validation of good old-fashioned police work. Over the past 4 years the police have analysed more than 350,000 sales records looking for suspicious patterns of spending.    They then correlate the purchases with the records of gun owners, and they discover the gang's straw buyers.   But to me, it also validates the strengthening of the laws back in 2019 after the Christchurch mosque massacre.   That saw the banning of military-style semi-automatics, stricter rules on the “fit and proper” test to hold a license, the establishment of a gun registry, and a set of rules designed to ensure gun clubs and ranges are safe places.   At the time, gun owner