Gun laws 'idiotic' - Whanganui former German anti-terrorist police officer

New Zealand's gun laws need to be much tighter, Berny Maubach says. Photo / Bevan Conley

It's idiotic that New Zealanders with the right gun license can buy army-style fully automatic rifles, former German anti-terrorist police officer Berny Maubach says.

"What would you want a sub-machine gun for here - to shoot a deer?"

In Australia, the shooter in the Christchurch mosques on March 15 wouldn't have had a show of buying the guns that he used, Maubach said.

"He couldn't do it in England, or Germany or France or Italy - but they're on the market here."

In New Zealand anyone who can get a standard Category A gun licence can buy a semi- automatic firearm, which can be adapted to make it fully automatic.

In Germany in the 1970s Maubach was a detective inspector in anti-terrorist policing in North Rhine Westphalia. Some of his "customers" were members of the Baader-Meinhof Group, who bombed, assassinated and robbed banks in a far-left cause.

He was amazed when he moved to Whanganui in 1978, with three containers of belongings, that the customs officer in Whanganui didn't ask about guns. He had arrived with "an armoury".

Instead the officer wanted to know whether there was a television among his belongings.

"He told me to make sure that I have a TV licence."

New Zealand would have some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, Maubach said. He thinks authorities should find a way to get all the automatic rifles that people own, even if it means reimbursing the owners.

He's anticipating some resistance.

"They will come out of their little burrows and go why, why, why?"

In 1972 Maubach was aged 29 when the Palestinian Black September group took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the Summer Olympics in Munich.

He was rung at 5am, told to get on a plane, and briefed about the incident en route.

Bavarian police were completely unprepared for the action, and called in anti-terrorist police from other German states. Maubach gets goosebumps when he thinks about it now, but at the time lying in the darkness of a German military airport and waiting for hostages to arrive by helicopter was just part of his job.

"All of a sudden a shot was fired and then another one, and all of a sudden everyone was shooting," he said.

The 11 hostages and one police officer were all killed - and Israel did not return the Palestinian prisoners the Black September group had wanted.

"That happening in Munich, from a police angle, was a disaster."

Maubach has a very broad definition of terrorists.

"People who don't fit into our society somehow, and are violent about it."

He hasn't worked in police since arriving in New Zealand. Instead he was first a rabbiter, then a farm labourer, then an insurance salesman and since about 1980 the owner of the Vollrath Hanoverian horse stud.

His only use for guns these days is to kill a horse or a rabbit.