The system for licensing of firearms has improved considerably since the terror attack, the Christchurch inquest has heard. Photo: AFP
The Christchurch terror attack was foreseeable and successive governments failed to close the loophole that allowed the gunman access to military-style firearms, the inquest into the 51 worshippers murdered at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre has heard.
The inquest is examining gun laws at the time of the March 2019 shootings.
University of Waikato terrorism and firearms expert Professor Alexander Gillespie told the inquest the "system for both the licensing of firearms and the regulation of particularly dangerous firearms platforms before 15 March 2019 was critically flawed".
"What occurred was foreseeable in terms of both the lax controls around both the legal and the illegal market for firearms," he said.
"Post the terror attack, the system has been improved considerably. However, the new system has not adopted innovations to reduce the threat even more to which New Zealand could learn from practices already evident in some comparable countries.
"Finally, for the licensing authority, entrenched guidance on how to identify and deal with concerning people who may hold extreme views, but do not cross the threshold for criminal conviction, should be given."
In 2016, Gillespie told a parliamentary select committee that another tragedy on the scale of Aramoana was foreseeable due to the lack of control over so-called military-style semi-automatic firearms.
In 1990, David Gray murdered 13 people in the small Dunedin settlement of Aramoana.
In 1992, Parliament moved to limit access to what they defined as "military-style semi-automatic firearms", which Gray used in the massacre.
However, changes to firearms restrictions primarily dealt with cosmetic features, and standard A-category firearms licence holders could still legally purchase semi-automatic centrefire rifles.
The purchase of magazines, including high-capacity magazines, remained entirely unregulated.
With the emergence of modular rifles, such as AR-15-style rifles, someone could legally buy a semi-automatic centrefire rifle using their standard licence and equip them with high-capacity magazines - in essence, building their own "military-style semi-automatic".
Brenton Tarrant used two such firearms during the March 2019 shootings.
In 2017, two people were killed by an unlicensed person who had illegally sourced such guns from Michael Hayes, a licensed firearms owner.
Gillespie told the inquest during the sentencing of Hayes, Judge John Macdonald said: "The way you modified these three firearms, there could be only one purpose, apart from target shooting, and that is to kill people. They were not hunting rifles, they were not sports rifles. They were rifles that were used by militaries around the world to kill other people."
Gillespie said if Tarrant had not been granted a firearms licence, he still could have obtained the guns illegally, as in the case mentioned.
However, the military-style semi-automatic loophole contributed to the deadly scale of the attack.
"The MSSA loophole or gap was one part of the equation that gave the pathway for Mr Tarrant to lawfully acquire, with minimal interference or oversight, the firepower that he needed to commit his crimes. The gap was so large that 51 people were killed," Gillespie said.
"It is my opinion that if this gap [was] closed off in advance, that although an attack may still have occurred, it would not have inflicted such a vast carnage."
In August 2017, then-Police Minister Paula Bennett received a briefing from police outlining the loophole in the law allowing people to access supposedly more-restricted military-style semiautomatic firearms.
The terrorist arrived in New Zealand the same month.
Within weeks he started the process to obtain his firearms licence.
About 18 months later, he carried out one of the deadliest mass shootings ever.
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