spinofflive
A competition at the ASC recorded earlier this year. Image: Facebook.
A competition at the ASC recorded earlier this year. Image: Facebook.

SocietyApril 10, 2019

Swastikas and semi-automatics: Auckland gun club neighbours speak out

Contributing writer
A competition at the ASC recorded earlier this year. Image: Facebook.
A competition at the ASC recorded earlier this year. Image: Facebook.

Neighbours of New Zealand’s biggest shooting range say they’re victims of targeted harassment, including Nazi symbols scrawled on a resident’s property. Police, they say, have not taken their concerns seriously. The Auckland Shooting Club, in response, says it’s being ‘victimised’. Don Rowe reports.

Update 11/4 8am – Auckland Shooting Club president Chris Gee has resigned.

“All I can say is that [residents] shouldn’t be worried about the club. The club’s closed now,” he told RNZ.

Update 4.20pm – The Auckland Shooting Club’s Certificate of Compliance has been overturned by the Court of Appeal.

The Court of Appeal concluded that the Council had insufficient information to allow it to properly assess the extent of earthworks involved in the proposed activity at the Auckland Shooting Club, and on that basis the Certificate of Compliance should not have been issued.

The Vipassana Foundation Charitable Trust Board has been awarded costs payable by Auckland Council, Raymond O’Brien, Victoria Pichler and Auckland Shooting Club Incorporated.

“Auckland Council has received the court’s judgement to set aside the CoC (Certificate of Compliance) for an outdoor shooting range at 273 Tuhirangi Road,” said Ian Dobson, manager resource consents north. “Council is currently reviewing the judgement, and considering the implications of the court’s decision.”

–

Around 9.30am on the 16th March, as New Zealand awoke to its first day as a nation in mourning, members of the Auckland Shooting Club in Kaukapakapa hit the firing range. The gunshots echoed around the Makarau Valley, over fields, streams, homes and the 30-year-old Vipassana meditation centre, where students sit for ten days in silent retreat. A neighbour of the ASC who has lived in the valley for two decades told The Spinoff it was one of the loudest days of shooting since the club opened in July 2017.

“It was just absolute shock. All that was on my mind was what had happened in Christchurch, and then to hear gunfire like that was just shocking. I just couldn’t believe it. It was beyond comprehension. They’re not like neighbours shooting at a possum or something. It’s very different hearing semi-automatics, or really loud calibre guns.”

Residents of the Makarau Valley and the Auckland Shooting Club have been in dispute since 2016, when the club was granted a consent to build a range on land over the hill from the meditation centre, which opened in the valley in 1987. Neighbours have erected signs on their properties protesting the noise from the club. Tensions have risen in the days since the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch, in which 50 people were killed by a white supremacist shooter.

In January this year, the neighbour, who we have agreed not to name, woke to find a large swastika and the words, “If your reading this ur in range” spray-painted on their shed and a protest sign. Another sign had been torn out of the ground.

“The first thing we noticed was our sign that said ‘Quiet please babies are sleeping’ destroyed,” said the neighbour. “And they were – I had four of them sleeping inside. Then we noticed the swastika, and the message that had been spray-painted.

“Before Christchurch I’d never given a lot of thought to the safety aspect of the club. Christchurch added another dimension to everything, especially when the facts came out about the shooter, and their far-right tendencies, and their training. I thought, hey, I had a swastika and a threatening message, and someone entered our private property at night to do this, and on a night when I had four grandchildren sleeping here. To know that someone possibly associated with the gun club was creeping around my property was horrifying.”

Since then, residents said, vehicles have been seen parking for minutes at a time outside houses with protest signs, speeding off when someone approaches. John Raffaelli has lived in the Makarau Valley for 20 years, and the local Keep the Peace society is registered to his address. Since Christmas, Raffaelli said, cars have loitered on the verge outside his home in what he infers as an attempt to intimidate.

“I’ve noticed them at least four times, and my wife has seen them out there at night. They sped off when she turned on the lights, and when I go to talk to them they do the same thing. It makes me a little bit nervous, especially with the vandalism that happened – it was around that time they upped the ante on us, tooting and parking outside. And we know they have guns because they can’t store them at the club. So there’s a guy outside, who I know has a gun in his car… that makes me nervous.”

Raffaelli said tensions have heightened in the days since the Christchurch massacre, with residents increasingly concerned about the semi-automatic weapons used at the club and the racist vandalism of a resident’s property.

“The swastika was the last straw for a lot of people, then when you look at Christchurch, that guy never missed a shot – if he was shooting at targets, he would be up in the top quartile, he’d be a club champ. And he’s learned that at a club with semi-automatic weapons. He never missed, he never wasted a bullet, and they’re doing that same training there. Someone is putting swastikas on a shed, and you think … You wonder what they’re doing up there.”

“If your reading this ur in range”: Graffiti left on a property adjacent to the ASC. Image: Facebook.

Promotional videos on ASC-affiliated Facebook pages show men with semi-automatic rifles shooting around corners, manoeuvring around barricades and firing through makeshift windows. There is nothing illegal about that: the events are a legitimate sport with international recognition. In the aftermath of the mosque shootings National MP Chris Bishop said he was disappointed sporting competitors wouldn’t get an exemption from the planned gun reforms. Neighbours of the club, however, say the activity is ill-judged in the shadow of Christchurch.

ASC co-founder Victoria Pichler told a parliamentary select committee last week that the club had a diverse membership with more than 25 nationalities, offering new immigrants a sense of belonging in New Zealand. The expedited gun law reforms were based on a “sham of a consultation”, she told the committee, and left her feeling betrayed and alienated.

“This has destroyed my sense of identity as a New Zealander.”

Vipassana Meditation Centre trustee Kirsty McKay said the local community was left feeling shaken and unsafe. She said she was unsatisfied with police response to complaints.

Residents say ASC visitors have shouted insults as they drive past homes on Tuhirangi Road, and beep their horns incessantly. In August last year, a sign was erected inside the ASC’s front gate reading “Honk if Shooting Makes You Happy”.

Locals on Tuhirangi road have displayed protest signs since before the club opened two years ago, originally addressing the means by which ASC secured consent, which is contested. Those signs had been stolen, smashed and vandalised repeatedly, said McKay.

McKay said that men which locals believed to be linked to the club had been seen removing protest signs at the end of December 2017. Police, she said, had not yet contacted those who witnessed it.

The swastika spray-painted beneath a protest sign on a property near the ASC. Image: supplied.

On the night of 28 December, 2018, valley residents witnessed three vehicles, including a VW SUV owned by club president Chris Gee, entering the ASC after-hours with a trailer in tow. Gunshots were heard until around 11.30pm, and three police vehicles later arrived to speak with the shooters. That night, some time after midnight, residents said, almost every protest sign on Tuhirangi Road disappeared. Photos seen by The Spinoff show an SUV heading back the other way just before 1am, with the trailer loaded. Police, McKay said, showed little interest in pursuing complaints.

Gee strongly denied any suggestion they had been removing signs. They had been possum shooting, he told The Spinoff. The trailer was filled with rubbish from the club. The club rejected all involvement with theft and vandalism on Tuhirangi Road.

“It is not condoned by the club, those actions are condemned by the club, any member found doing that would be gone,” said Gee.

“It’s not our culture. When I drive down the road I give people a friendly wave. It’s easy for people to assume the gun club are the aggressor but we’re just not. It’s like a plot to discredit the club. It’s another one where I feel as a firearms owner we’re being victimised for my sport and interests. They’re unjust accusations. The neighbours should not feel threatened or intimidated. Going to the media doesn’t help, it just adds fuel to the fire.”

He also told The Spinoff that 6% of the club’s membership are police officers.

The sentiment among many in the community, however, remains uneasy.

Ahead of a public meeting for resident concerned about the ASC 18 months ago, club co-founder Raymond O’Brien had “encouraged his followers on Facebook to swamp the meeting, stating that he’d come down with as many members as he could muster,” said McKay. “His followers responded with ‘bring your guns’ and similar comments.”

Concerned community members said their attempts to get a police officer to attend were unfruitful. The then-community constable for Rodney did, however, phone Raymond O’Brien and the call to club members was withdrawn, McKay said. Some locals, however, were still too scared to attend the meeting.

A police spokesperson said they were unable to discuss the matter without a privacy waiver. The Spinoff has sought a waiver from the residents involved.

McKay said complaints against residents, which she believed to be malicious in their intent, had also been made to council and police. They included everything from the installation of an outside toilet and false claims of a septic tank leakage, to an entire report commissioned against the Vipassana meditation centre, accusing it of violating the terms of its resource consent, she said.

“The report was investigated twice by council and found to be baseless,” said McKay. “O’Brien [also] tried and failed to secure criminal convictions against me, personally, for trespass and firearms violations, despite the fact I’ve never set foot on his property nor fired a gun.”

Residents said the complaints were yet another front in a battle which has dragged for more than three years, and which residents fear is escalating yet again. ASC club president Chris Gee has said he “wished everyone could just get along.

“What is being done is perfectly legal. If you can’t shoot a gun in an area zoned for it, where can you?”

But as the place of firearms in New Zealand is debated on the national stage, the residents of the Makarau Valley say the place of the ASC in their community must be too. At what point, they ask, does the right to bear arms supplant the right to security and peace of mind?

For the neighbour who found a swastika on their shed, the last three years have felt like an ordeal.

“It all intermingles to the point where I wonder what’s next. I can’t understand it. I suspect it’s going to keep going for as long as the legal process takes.

“That’s what gets to me – I don’t know when there’s going to be an end to this.”

don@thespinoff.co.nz

Read more

More Reading

Guns vs roses: the new battle of the Kaipara

Hapū and handguns: the battle of the Kaipara continues

The bizarre true story of the gun club which invaded the Makarau Valley

Keep going!
A march for Victims of the Christchurch Mosque attacks in Duesseldorf. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
A march for Victims of the Christchurch Mosque attacks in Duesseldorf. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

SocietyApril 10, 2019

I’m German and I live in Christchurch. Let’s talk about swastikas

Contributing writer
A march for Victims of the Christchurch Mosque attacks in Duesseldorf. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
A march for Victims of the Christchurch Mosque attacks in Duesseldorf. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

When we arrived to live in New Zealand we were shocked to discover how tolerant many people were of flagrant expression of neo-Nazism, writes Anke Richter

When we migrated to New Zealand 16 years ago as a family, many things were different to our old life. Bus drivers were friendly. “North facing” meant sunny and warm. Kids ran around barefoot. Spaghetti could be tinned and eaten on toast. Birds came before the morning news. And swastikas were not that big a deal.

In 2004, not even a year after our arrival, we attended the first antiracist rally in Christchurch, initiated by the Asian community who had enough of being harassed, spat at, ridiculed. It was a different cultural experience, though I had been to many “demos” back home, as we call them. The 1990s had seen the rise in Germany of skinheads and neo-Nazis who hated immigrants, long before the refugee crisis swept over Europe. My boyfriend back then was a political activist from Iran, where he would have been thrown into prison and tortured. We stood in human chains around asylum seekers’ homes to protect them from nightly attacks. Years later, my husband joined a protest as a medic, travelling across the former GDR border with anti-fascists who were likely to be beaten up once off their bus.

We didn’t expect such volatile clashes when we marched peacefully through our Garden City, pushing a stroller. But we also didn’t expect to be joined by a dozen National Front members. It was the first time I saw swastikas up close on real people. They’re illegal where I’m from.

I say “joined” not because these neo-Nazis supported our march – they were opposing it of course, and pathetically small in numbers – but because everyone was so civil with them. They were even handed the megaphone for the sake of balance. Only one left-winger who came from Switzerland tried to interfere, aghast. He almost pulled out his dreadlocks in despair over this act of courtesy. In Europe we were doing anything legally possible to prevent these groups from being vocal and gaining notoriety.

The next surprise was seeing Māori among the white supremacists. One guy had a swastika tattooed on his forehead, which historically didn’t make much sense – indigenous people ranked low in the race hierarchy of Nazi eugenics. I didn’t know back then that the Mongrel Mob Kingdom had “Sieg Heil” as their war cry (they dropped it after the mosque attack) and a “Heil’s Kitchen” cooking group, with more than 90,000 members on Facebook (still going). The gang used the martial greeting out of ignorance, not ideology. For 50 years. Did no-one tell them?

At the end of the 2004 Christchurch march, we all sang the national anthem together, left and right. I had to tackle this phenomenon with sarcasm: in Aotearoa, even neo-Nazis were apparently bicultural, and everyone gets along.

Five years later, Lincoln University students showed their own brand of humour when they dressed up as SS officers and “concentration camp Jews” for their Oktoberfest. Who can blame them when even young Prince Harry found it OK once to wear a swastika armband for a costume party? He would have had a more expensive education. Windsor is also a lot closer in proximity to Berlin – and Israel – than Lincoln. It was doubly painful for me that Germanic stereotypes didn’t mean bratwurst legs with socks in sandals but mocking the worst atrocities of the last century. The German students at Lincoln recoiled and left the party in disgust, as did some Kiwis.

One work party to which we were invited shortly after moving to Christchurch was planned around a second world war theme. The funny side completely escaped us. Should we go as bomb-raid victims and fold our legs into stumps? Or scribble numbers on our arms? There was nothing to celebrate or spoof for us, and that is not – as one sympathetic Anglo-Saxon assumed – because we “lost the war”. Maybe we just didn’t grow up on Hogan’s Heroes. Germany is only now able to derive some hilarity from The Third Reich, as in the 2015 comedy Look Who’s Back”, or in 2007 with Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler – by a Jewish filmmaker from Berlin who was more confident to break that taboo.

Adolf Hitler is still the first association internationally with my birthplace: before beer, soccer, lederhosen and VWs. That might be unfair and simplistic for the post-war generations there. But it’s not simplistic to draw the line from a white supremacy terrorist to the scourge of the Nazis. The shooter was a Nazi, of the worst and modern kind, even though he was Australian and not politicised in Deutschland – a solid democracy now for 70 years that not only gave us Kraftwerk and Claudia Schiffer, but recently embraced a million refugees when other countries shut their doors. I don’t drink beer, watch soccer or wear a dirndl, but one thing is typically German about me: I don’t take Nazis lightly.

A cartoon from Stern magazine

Most of the 13,000 or more German immigrants in New Zealand feel dread and bewilderment around “Sieg Heil”, Nazi dress-ups and any glorification of second world war replica. (One exception: There was the German founder of the still famous Wunderbar in Lyttelton who once decorated the table soccer figurines with swastikas and stars of David.)

Anthropology professor Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich from Victoria University of Wellington documented in her book Keeping a Low Profile that this sensitivity is as typical for Kiwi-Krauts as using chopsticks is for the Chinese. It’s a good trait, like punctuality and directness, and just as irritating sometimes. Our discomfort is not just shame but also an alertness – like a DOC ranger who sees species of native birds I wouldn’t be able to identify.

I’ll never forget our visit to Napier prison. It felt morbid and dark, not just because of the executions that took place there. We saw far more recent signs of human distortion: swastika after swastika carved into walls and bedposts.

I have a German friend who’s not going to the local swimming bay any more because of the many inked swastikas he sees on naked arms and backs there. My husband was standing behind a skinhead in a queue at the AA who had a big swastika on his shaved head. It was a while ago, on 27 January 2005 exactly – the 60th Holocaust Remembrance Day of the liberation of Auschwitz. Maybe that gave him more courage to say something to the guy in military boots in front of him while no-one else took much notice. And maybe 10 years later he wouldn’t have said anything any more because he had become too acclimatised.

Another German friend cycled past a party in her New Brighton neighbourhood and was appalled to see a Nazi flag hanging in the open garage while no-one seemed to mind. She knows it’s not the Kiwi way to get involved – “each to their own”, “let’s not make a fuss”. One week after the attack, while I was heading to the first public prayer at Hagley Park, she texted me. “Now I’m thinking about reporting these people in my street,”. She was still hesitant. “Do it,” I said.

I wrote a comment piece around the 2004 anti-racism march in Christchurch for the Press and was publicly called a “chest beating guilty liberal” and “newcomer to the debate” by a local politician. Today I’m not so new to the debate. Sadly, I have also become desensitised to what once appalled me. But I still cannot get my head around our foreign minister who has been xenophobic to win votes and got away with it. Hang on, isn’t that the kind of job that takes you to places abroad where people might look and speak differently? Oh, he’s a good bloke. He played rugby and can hold a drink. Who cares. She’ll be right.

But she won’t be right. During that first week after the tragedy, the New Zealand Herald revealed that pig heads had been dumped at the Al Noor Mosque by neo-Nazi Phil Arps in 2016. He had filmed himself with the Hitler salute, shouting “Bring on the cull”. Arps, the owner of “Beneficial Insulation”, has been driving his van with Nazi symbols around the city for years – sun wheel, 14.88 and all. It wasn’t a news story until now. And he sure wasn’t the only one of his ilk, as the Islamic Women’s Council has pointed out over and over again without apparently being heard.

Also in that first week, a swastika was sprayed on the Christchurch street where the mosque shooter was arrested. In the light of the attack, it seems absolutely disgusting. Why was it not shocking before, in the light of eight decades of hate and the murder of millions of innocent people it represents?

To use the words of Afghanistan war veteran Simon Stromborn from the Porirua RSA: “People have said the Christchurch terror attacks was the day we lost our innocence. It was also the day our ignorance was exposed.”

I want to get this off my chest without pointing even the tiniest finger at this country – yes, mine – while it was showing the world how to react to terrorism with love. When I walk past the sea of cards and wilting flowers on the footpath alongside the Botanical garden on my way to a victim at the hospital who might never walk again, or a grieving family that is just holding it all together, or finally to the Masjid Al Noor for a visit, I feel nothing but gratitude for living and belonging here. I wish I could say I’m proud as well. I am. But it’s too ingrained in me that national pride is wrong.

Over in Germany, what happened in Christchurch has already fallen off the news radar again. My work is slowing down. They have their own demons to tackle. An alarming report by a leading institute about right-wing extremism came out last week in Der Spiegel. It states that the number of right-wing hate crimes in the country has been rising drastically for years. The gap between what’s on the police’s radar and what is really happening to people of different colours and religions is huge. The authorities turned a blind eye. We’re all the same and all in this together.

Society