Grim history, missed chance?

The names of those killed at Aramoana are listed on a memorial in the seaside village.PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON

Troubled loners carried out New Zealand’s two deadliest mass killings with now-banned guns. As the 30th anniversary of the Aramoana massacre looms, reporters Molly Houseman and Daisy Hudson ask if lessons from that tragedy could have prevented the mosque terror attacks.

The same model of gun David Gray used to kill his neighbours in Aramoana was for sale the day of the Christchurch mosque shootings.

• Dark day to be marked by responders, families

It is for that reason that Tim Ashton, who was a member of the police armed offenders squad (AOS) that took down Gray, calls the aftermath of the 1990 massacre in which 13 people were killed a "missed opportunity".

He is not alone in thinking that.

John Banks was just weeks into his role as police minister in the newly elected National government when Gray went on his deadly rampage.

He believed if tougher changes had been made in 1992, the Christchurch terror attacks and the loss of 51 lives may have been prevented.

"I can’t get that out of my mind."

On November 13, 1990, Gray, who had a fascination with guns and the military, armed himself with semi-automatic weapons, including a .22-calibre Remington Nylon 66 and a .223 Norinco 84, and opened fire on his neighbours in Aramoana.

Many of the victims were shot multiple times.

Garry Holden (38) was struck seven times, a brutal attack that was witnessed by his two 11-year-old daughters, Chiquita and Jasmine, and his girlfriend Julie-Anne Bryson’s adopted 9-year-old daughter, Rewa Bryson.

Despite the girls’ efforts to run and hide, Gray found Chiquita and shot her in the arm, the bullet entering her chest and abdomen, with a semi-automatic sports rifle.

Detective Sergeant Gary Binney holds David Gray’s .223 Norinco semi-automatic assault rifle after the shootings at Aramoana. The rest of the guns are Gray’s arsenal. PHOTO: JON CAMERON

She managed to survive, escaping out a back door and fleeing past her father’s body.

When Gray found Jasmine and Rewa, he killed them.

He then set the house on fire, meaning the cause of girls’ deaths could not be determined by the coroner.

A 33-year-old unemployed loner, Gray used guns he owned legally under the Arms Act 1983, allowing him to be better armed than the police initially on the scene, Mr Ashton said.

About 28 years later, terrorist Brenton Tarrant entered Al Noor mosque and then Linwood Islamic Centre, shooting at those attending Friday prayer.

Using semi-automatic weapons, Tarrant, who was then 29 and also unemployed with few close friends, killed 49 people within about 15 minutes.

The death toll, which included parents, children, husbands, wives and grandparents, rose to 51 in the coming days.

Crown prosecutor Barnaby Hawes told the court during his sentencing that Tarrant had begun formulating a plan years earlier, and his goal was to "inflict as many fatalities as possible".

Mr Ashton said semi-automatics and assault rifles served no other purpose than to inflict mass casualties.

Had the 2019 reforms been in place earlier, Tarrant would not have been able to buy the firearms he used to do just that.

Formerly a police officer for nearly two decades, Mr Ashton was a member of both the police AOS and the anti-terrorist squad, now called the special tactics group.

He has been shot by an offender, and was one of the AOS members who shot and killed Gray in Aramoana.

Mr Ashton was among those who campaigned for years for stricter regulations after the shooting, but he was met with varying degrees of opposition and indifference.

Now an ardent campaigner for firearms control, he says more should have been done in its wake.

While the Arms Amendment Act 1992 made some changes to gun laws in response to the Aramoana tragedy, it did not include a ban on military style semi-automatics, despite one being proposed by the Labour Party, then the opposition.

Following the Government’s ban on semi-automatics after the Christchurch terror attacks, he was also pushing the importance of a national firearms register.

"If police were called to my house ... I could have 50 firearms, I could have 100, they wouldn’t know.

"I could have onsold 99 of them and they wouldn’t know."

A second round of reform, including the establishment of an independent entity to take over firearms licensing and administration, was passed earlier this year, paving the way for a register.

But that will not come into force for another few years.

He is hopeful the second tranche of reforms will help to achieve his ultimate goal.

David Gray. PHOTO: FILE

"All I want to see is New Zealand a safer place to live."

So too does Mr Banks, who witnessed some of the carnage first hand when he visited Aramoana the morning after the massacre.

"I remember the abject fear caught in the split-second of death, etched in the face of an angelic 6-year-old boy."

That 6-year-old was Leo Wilson. He died of shock from his gunshot wounds.

Mr Banks led the charge for gun reform in the wake of the Aramoana tragedy, but ultimately had to put forward a watered-down Bill after stiff opposition from many of his caucus colleagues.

The amendments meant that firearms and ammunition could no longer be bought by mail order without a written permit, photos were required for new firearms licences, lifetime licences were scrapped in favour of 10-year ones, and the "fit and proper person" criteria was introduced for gun owners.

However, an independent review of firearm control in 1997, the Thorp report, found that due to low public compliance with the amendments, the new laws were not effective and "radical" reform was needed.

Mr Banks thinks the changes passed in 2019 following the mosque shootings should have been part of the earlier legislation.

The problem in 1992 was the number of rural, farming-backed members of his party’s caucus who were getting huge pressure from the rural sector and gun lobby to fight tough restrictions, he said.

John Banks speaks to media in Port Chalmers in 1990. PHOTO: ODT ARCHIVE

"The problem I had was there were multi-layers of pressure from the gun lobby, and the National Party caucus from rural, provincial New Zealand locked and loaded behind them.

"And consequentially, I didn’t have a hope in Hades of getting the legislation we now have on to the books."

Though some reforms were passed at the time, the import of semi-automatic weapons was not banned, something Mr Banks regrets now.

The debate about gun reform following the mosque shooting was so similar to that after Aramoana, he contacted Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern "to tell her to stay staunch, and just get it done" — and she did.

Julie-Anne Tamati (formerly Julie-Anne Bryson) was shot at by Gray as she rushed to save her daughter Rewa who was killed, and Rewa’s step sisters Chiquita and Jasmine.

She has a view on guns but also on how the system treated victims of mass shootings.

At the time of the gun reforms following Aramoana she was in the United States.

She recalled arriving at a US airport, where security were armed with assault rifles, meant having to face a "big fear".

While she was in the US, officials tracked her down to ask her questions about planned gun reforms.

"I don’t think that all guns should be banned but ... there is no need for things like the AK47 machine guns and semi-automatics," she said.

It was about regulating the owner rather than the gun, she believed.

She felt support for survivors was lacking at the time and hoped there had been changes in that area too.

"There were times when you needed someone to talk to, not just me but my family and my extended family, and there wasn’t access for that, at that time."

For Dunedin man Howard Halliday, preventing a tragedy such as Aramoana or the mosque shootings, comes down to more than just gun control.

In 1990, the 26-year-old was working as a shop assistant at Dunedin’s Centrefire gun shop when Gray called in to buy some ammunition.

When Mr Halliday woke up a few days later and heard there had been a shooting at Aramoana, he immediately picked up the phone and called police.

He had concerns about Gray, he told them.

"There was only one person who came to mind.

"I’d asked him how one of his rifles was going, and he mentioned that he’d gone to the beach and shot a seagull. To my mind that was very odd behaviour."

Almost a year earlier, Gray had also bought his AK47 lookalike (Norinco) and a .22 rifle from the store.

Mr Halliday (56) worked at Centrefire, which has since closed, for 24 years. He now works with young people suffering mental health issues.

While tighter gun restrictions were positive, he felt better vetting and mental health support was important in preventing other tragedies from occurring.

"Like all of these things, it wasn’t the law, it was a person who was unfit to have a firearm due to his mental illness.

"With David, it turned out there were a number of occasions when he did things which were not appropriate and it never got back to the police."

Stricter laws could not stop someone who really wanted to carry out an attack, he said.

"You can minimise opportunities for things to happen, but you can’t stop these things from happening."

However, National Centre for Peace and Conflict retired foundation director Prof Kevin Clements said picking out who could be capable of such an act was not foolproof.

There were wider issues.

"It is not so much a mental health issue as it is a social wellbeing issue."

One of the challenges of modernity and a Western capitalist system was that it encouraged individualism, competition and alienation, he said.

The coffinof Sergeant Stu Guthrie, of Port Chalmers, who had been shot by David Gray, is carried to a hearse after his funeral on November 19, 1990. About 2000 people attended the service at St Paul’s Cathedral. PHOTO: JANE DAWBER

"When people don’t make it — high levels of estrangement and deep loneliness."

The role of weapons in New Zealand’s "hyper-masculinised" culture also had its part to play.

"Weapons should not be seen, and should not be legitimated, as extensions of the male ego."

Had military style semi-automatics been banned following Aramoana, it would have been more difficult for Tarrant to have done what he did, Prof Clements said.

Five days after the March 2019 shootings, Ms Ardern announced a ban on all military-style semi-automatics and assault rifles.

The next day, most semi-automatic firearms were reclassified as military-style semi-automatics, with exceptions for persons engaged in pest control.

The creation of a buy-back programme for newly banned firearms followed, as well as limits being established on magazine capacity for semi-automatic weapons, a national firearms register, and tighter restrictions on who could obtain a firearms licence.

For those who argued guns were not the problem when it came to mass shootings, Mr Banks had a simple message.

"Tell that to the late Stu Guthrie’s wife and kids."