Passage of a bill amending the regulatory framework for firearms before the general election in Aotearoa New Zealand (7 November 2026) is a commitment in the Coalition Agreement between the National and ACT parties.
The Chairs of the AoNZ Trauma Sub-committee and AoNZ National Committee made a joint submission on the Arms Bill 2025, emphasising our commitment to reducing the seriousness and frequency of trauma associated with gun injuries. We advised surgeons see first-hand the often-horrendous injuries people suffer and how this affects them and their families. Most injuries from firearms require multiple operations and can result in a greatly reduced quality of life for those injured and their families. Gun injuries impose significant direct costs on the health sector. Exposure to violence has been linked to an increase in the risk of other medical illnesses, including asthma, hypertension, cancer and stroke, and to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. reducing the capacity of the health system to deliver care. Gun violence thus has a significant opportunity cost for our country and impacts adversely on the achievement of health targets, including contributing to long surgical waiting lists and lack of access to care for other New Zealanders. The nature of injuries from gun violence also impacts adversely on the wellbeing of the medical workforce, including moral distress and workload.
Our submission supported the principles of the Arms Bill 2025 (the Bill) that the possession and use of arms is a privilege, and that anyone doing anything involving arms must act in the interests of personal and public safety. We support this being achieved by a combination of encouraging a culture of community safety, enabling legitimate possession and use of firearms, ensuring compliance through education and enforcement, and improving the oversight of the firearms regulatory regime to improve public trust and confidence in the system. We supported important provisions for which RACS has advocated over time, including retaining the ban on Military-Style Semi-Automatic (MSSA) weapons, retaining universal registration of gun ownership, and stricter gun licensing criteria and protocols. Another proposed change we promoted is to enable and mandate better collaboration among government agencies, including law enforcement, and healthcare providers to prevent at-risk individuals accessing firearms, where a formalised red flag system would be established to empower other agencies to raise concerns about the ‘fit and proper’ status of licence holders. We also supported other proposals including persons on the National Gang List being prevented from holding a gun licence, and establishment of a new Arms Regulator as an autonomous agency within New Zealand Police with well-defined functions including maintaining the arms register, monitoring, enforcement, and promoting and educating the public about firearms safety. We supported an evidence-based review of the operation of the Act by 2030.
We opposed extending the vetting period for pest controllers who use semi-automatic firearms from 2.5 to five years, with a check-in with regulator at 2.5 years; allowing employees of dealers and museum workers to handle pistols and restricted firearms without having an appropriate endorsement on their licence; and extending the duration of dealer licences from the current one year to five years, after a probationary period.