Auckland CBD gunman Matu Reid entered an Auckland construction site with a shotgun. Photos / Hayden Woodward
The actions of Matu Reid on July 20 have raised important questions about gun violence in New Zealand.
Why was someone who had strangled their partner was only given home detention? Should the justice system have identified Reid as a greater risk to society?
Former probation officer and Open Justice reporter for the NZ Herald Ric Stevens tells The Front Page podcast he has seen little evidence in any of the reporting on the matter that would have led to Reid having a higher risk profile.
“This is just my opinion, I never met the man and I don’t know anyone who managed him… but he didn’t really have much of a history before this,” says Stevens.
“He had a very nasty domestic violence incident where he strangled a woman and that shouldn’t be diminished, but he only had an assault conviction before that. All the measures that we use to try and assess risk would have been looking at a comparatively short criminal history – and he wouldn’t have been considered anything more than low risk.”
Stevens also doesn’t believe that the sentence of home detention was light or unreasonable.
“Judges get a bad rap because people see them as being lenient, but they’re actually bound by the Sentencing Act 2002, which says they have to impose the least restrictive sentence in the circumstances.
“And if someone is on what they call a short sentence of imprisonment, of less than two years, the judges have to consider home detention and it would take an extraordinary reason for them not to be given home detention at that stage.”
The other big question hanging over this is how an individual like Matu Reid was able to attain the firearm when he was on home detention and didn’t have a firearms licence.
Speaking to the Front Page podcast, NZ Herald senior investigative reporter Jared Savage says New Zealand brought in a firearms registry this year to keep track of guns across the country. While this is a step in the right direction, this system still has major shortcomings given it has to fill the gaps left since we last had a guns registry in 1984.
“We’ve had a 30- to 40-year period where we haven’t had a national firearms registry,” says Savage.
“This one was brought in just last month off the back of law changes following the terrorist attack in Christchurch.”
Savage says police will be working hard to establish exactly how Reid was able to get his hands on the shotgun used in the attack.
Given the absence of a registry for so long and the fact that those on-selling guns didn’t have to keep records of that sale, Savage says it remains incredibly difficult to work out how many guns are in circulation and who has them.
“There’s a huge pool of firearms that available to fall into the wrong hands,” says Savage.
“I suspect that’s what we saw last week with the shooting in downtown Auckland.”
Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear the full story.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. It is presented by Damien Venuto, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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