WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Nov 11, (AP): New Zealand’s government will end the involvement of police officers in regulating gun ownership, an official said Tuesday as she announced sweeping firearms law reforms. The move is intended to ease tensions between the gun regulator and firearms owners, which have been fraught since the agency's creation following a shooting massacre at two New Zealand mosques.

The Firearms Safety Authority has overseen gun ownership since 2022 after an inquiry underlined the way the white supremacist attacker legally acquired numerous weapons without attracting law enforcement scrutiny. The changes unveiled in Wellington by Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee stopped short of what the police union and those bereaved in the Christchurch massacre feared: a reversal of the near-complete ban on semiautomatic firearms passed after the attacker killed 51 Muslims at prayer on March 15, 2019.

McKee, a lobbyist for gun owners before she entered parliament in 2020, told reporters her bid to relax the semiautomatic weapons ban for some sports shooters wasn’t approved by the Cabinet. Her government had refused to rule out reversing the ban before. Instead, her changes focused on removing uniformed officers from the regulatory body and altering its oversight.

Once McKee's law passes, the authority will report directly to the government, rather than the head of the New Zealand Police. "There will be no blue shirts in the Firearms Safety Authority,” McKee said, referring to police uniforms. The 15 officers who worked at the authority would return to police duties, which will still include enforcing gun crime laws.

"We need to rebuild the trust and confidence between the regulator and the licensed firearms community that has diminished severely over the past six years,” said McKee. She said "a lot of the blame" for the Christchurch attack was directed at gun owners, who say police should be focusing on law enforcement, not on regulation compliance or licensing.

The regulator is currently a unit within the police department. The law change would create a more independent legal structure that would only share corporate services with the law enforcement agency. The body couldn't be entirely separated from the police department due to a reliance on law enforcement databases, McKee said. 

The Australian attacker, who moved to New Zealand to carry out the massacre, was granted a license and legally amassed semiautomatic weapons after being radicalized online. Lawmakers changed the rules after the attack to require more information from applicants, such as travel histories, and tighter policies about character referees which might have raised questions when Brenton Tarrant applied for a license.