Same Country, Different Speech Rules: What Firearms Licence Holders Can’t Say Online

Opinion Piece || Grant Fletcher Barrister

https://www.grantfletcher.co.nz/

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Do firearms owners have the same right to express themselves online or in public as everyone else?

That question is no longer theoretical. Recently, comments about Indian migration into New Zealand, made on the eve of a visit by the Indian Prime Minister, were followed by an armed Police visit, seizure of firearms, and revocation of a licence. As I understand it, the speech was not prosecuted as a criminal offence. The sanction sat in the licensing system.

New Zealand does not have a constitutional free-speech right of the American kind. Freedom of expression is affirmed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, but it is constrained by suppression orders, defamation, and “hate speech” rules.

Even so, the sharper question for a firearms licence holder is this: if none of those restrictions is engaged, can you say what other people can say? In my experience, often not.

If Police consider a licence holder “dodgy,” social media can be combed for years to confirm a preconceived view.

Positive factors are readily overlooked: no prior offending, steady work, a pro-social life. Context is stripped out. A military veteran’s “in joke” based on his experiences in the Service was treated as “spreading hatred.” Interests and hobbies are sometimes read as ideology.

I have seen conclusions drawn along lines like these:

Online comment or interest	Police conclusion (as put to the holder)
Collects German WWII militaria	Nazi
Interested in WWII	Nazi
Likes Nordic mythology/Vikings	Nazi
Listens to heavy metal	Nazi
Interested in tactical products	Nazi/terrorist
Comments on migration	Nazi/terrorist/white supremacist
Opposed to firearms law changes	Nazi/terrorist
Posts a Nazi joke (poking fun at the Austrian painter)	Nazi

Any of that can be taken wildly out of context. None of it, by itself, is a substitute for the criminal standard that applies to everyone else.

A firearms licence is a privilege with serious public-safety duties. Fit and proper must mean something real. But if words that stay below the criminal threshold can still end a licence, and if the “line” is whoever holds the pen that day, then licence holders are not living under the same speech rules as the rest of the public. They are living under residual discretion.

If you dislike the outcome, you can seek review, or spend thousands in court. That is not guidance. That is a bill for saying something lawful, or for a clumsy joke.

The practical advice, ugly as it is, is simple. Watch what you say. Be careful on social media. No matter the context, no matter how legitimate the view, no matter how decent and law-abiding the person, a firearms licence holder cannot always say what other people can. If Police decide otherwise, you can become a target.

That is a poor way to run a licensing system in a free society. Draw the line in writing. Speech that does not meet the criminal threshold for incitement or related offences should not, by itself, be a pathway to seizure and revocation.