Between hockey and kayaks in the Sporting section on the TradeMe is the category hunting and shooting.
One of the reasons it stands out is that it boasts over 6000 items for sale, more than five times the goods for sale in the rugby and league section.
Click through and you can bid on a pump action shotgun being sold by someone in Christchurch; no mention of the legal requirements for both seller and buyer to have gun licences. Or you might prefer a M14 sniper rifle or a pistol grip shotgun.
And those are only a few examples from the first page. TradeMe does quite a trade in these weapons, many of which have nothing to do with the hunting part of the category.
Guyon Espiner's interview with Justice Minister Simon Power on Sunday morning got a heap of attention, given the government's plan to overhaul the justice system.
But the significance of that reform meant that some of Power's other comments got lost. Later in the interview when Espiner asked him what he made of TradeMe's gun-selling policy, Power said:
"Well the police will give us some advice, but I'm personally of the view it needs serious consideration".
Power was less keen to talk about registering guns as well as gun owners (something that's done in Australian, Britain, France, Canada, Sweden), but he was more than happy to talk about internet sales.
The hint is that the government would like to act if it can find a way. Napier gunman Jan Molenaar had at least 18 guns in his house, and while there's no evidence he bought or sold guns online, it's certainly a good time to review our gun control laws in this country. If the death of a serving police officer isn't motivation enough, what will be?
We have some of the loosest gun laws in the developed world. We have around 1.2 million guns in this country; at least that we know about. Estimates on the number of illegal guns range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
We even have a 12 year-old report by a senior judge with a short list of very practical suggestions. Yet three governments have failed to act. Does fear of the gun lobby outweigh the loss of life?
You can never be sure of cause and effect in these cases, but it's interesting to note that since Australia clamped down on its gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Australians are now half as likely to die of gunshot wounds as they were then.
Australia embarked on a vast buy-back-and-destroy programme that saw an estimated 30% of the country's guns dismantled. Guns, as well as gun owners, were registered, just as both cars and drivers are licensed. Do we need a massacre of our own before we sort out our own laws?
Critics of tighter gun control say that the horse is bolted, that criminals wouldn't register their guns, so what's the point? The answer is that most illegal guns were once legal guns. If we get a record of legal guns, then over the long-term it will become easier to track the illegal guns as well.
And the internet sales? In Australia they're illegal unless you're a licensed dealer.
Even in the US, which is famously rather fond of its guns,
auction site eBay has decided selling guns wasn't the behaviour of
a
socially responsible business.
They made that call in February 1999. A decade on, isn't it long
past time TradeMe followed suit?
They've dodged the bullet of bad publicity this week. Surely that provides the internet company with a window of opportunity to act on its own before the government acts or someone tracks a murder weapon back to an auction on its site.
