Push on gun relicensing

The police campaign to ensure firearms licences are renewed or surrendered is well under way.

And police are warning that they see the following-up of expired licences as an enforcement issue.

Inspector Joe Green, firearms licensing and vetting manager, said it was 12 years since the 10-year firearms licence started in 1993, and police were two years into the renewal period.

"There are about 225,000 current licence-holders and that's remained quite consistent for a while now," Mr Green said.

"What we did is just look at the computer and get the number of licences with a status of 'current'. Now we've only been able to do that this year with our new computer system, so it's a fairly new figure, where previously we've worked on a cumulative total."

He could not say how many people were facing relicensing but more people were applying for firearms licences each year.

"In the last 12 months we had 1700 more applications than we had in the same 12 months four years ago," he said.

"And then at the same time we have the renewal programme.

"We issued 34,349 firearms licences in the 04-05 year and approximately 27,700 were renewals."

He said that generally licence renewals were being processed fairly smoothly, although in some districts they were a couple of months behind.

"We do want to push to people that if they don't want to have a firearms licence then they should surrender it," Mr Green said.

"Those who have let their licence expire pay a higher fee by regulation [if they want to renew it] and we're following them up so they'll have to give us an explanation as to why they let their licence expire and what they've done with any firearms."

Firearms licences cost $123.75 and all applicants are vetted by police and have their security checked. The fee for re-issuing an expired licence is $236.25, plus $200 per endorsement for endorsement-holders.

Endorsements relate to people who hold special categories of firearms such as handguns or military-style automatic weapons, or gun collectors.

Bearing arms

There are about 225,000 firearms licence-holders.

Licences are issued for 10 years.

In the latest 12-month period 34,349 licences were issued.

27,700 were renewals.

- NZPA