Christchurch mosque terrorist would have struggled to buy guns from criminals, inquest told

The Christchurch mosque gunman would have struggled to get his hands on firearms through the criminal underworld, an expert on gangs told the inquest into the 51 worshippers murdered at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in March 2019.

The inquest is examining how terrorist Brenton Tarrant obtained his firearms licence, gun controls at the time of the shootings and looking at counterfactuals which might have led to lives being saved.

The terrorist began the process of getting a firearms licence within weeks of arriving in New Zealand in August 2017.

He was granted the licence later that year despite few links to New Zealand and using a friend he played online video games with as his main referee and that friend's parent as his secondary referee.

Using that standard A-category licence the terrorist legally purchased semi-automatic centrefire rifles and then equipped those firearms with high-capacity magazines, in essence building his own military-style semi-automatic firearms despite their apparent more restrictive status.

The terrorist used two such guns as his primary weapons during the 2019 mosque shootings.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert, a sociologist at the University of Canterbury, told the inquest the terrorist would have faced numerous barriers to getting a gun from criminal gangs, if police had not granted his licence.

"At one end of the spectrum, a man who grew up in a gang family and went on to become a gang member, for example, will have a significant number of contacts upon which to call," Dr Gilbert told the coroner.

"At the other end of the spectrum, a middle-class accountant from a middle-class home may have little or no idea where to even start to make contacts within the underworld.

"Criminals will also be suspicious of outsiders, particularly those who cannot be easily verified by trusted colleagues. These barriers may deter entrance or make entering the trade more difficult and perilous.

"Our accountant, for example, will likely face further difficulties because the language and behaviours of the underworld are distinctive, and outsiders are viewed with suspicion. These pitfalls to entry into the black economy are not just of nuisance value and can lead to violence, robbery, or being extorted.

"Criminals will often identify those they perceive as vulnerable and steal from them by, say, not providing the goods promised or by what's called taxing them, which is a form of extortion using their criminal pursuits to demand goods or money. Of course, these pitfalls include potential exposure to authorities and subsequent prosecution."

During his evidence, Dr Gilbert mentioned an article which detailed how Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Oslo and Utøya in 2011, unsuccessfully tried to get firearms from criminals in Europe before legally gaining a rifle by claiming it was for hunting.

The Christchurch terrorist would have faced similar difficulty in obtaining a firearm in New Zealand through criminal gangs, though his access to a large quantity of cash might have been an advantage, Dr Gilbert said.

Criminal gangs did not deal in firearms in the same way in which they dealt with other illicit goods, such as drugs.

Firearms were far more scarce, he said.

"There's so much more money for drugs than selling firearms and also a lot of crooks, because of that scarcity. If you get good weapons you tend to hold them fairly close because they've got more value to you than they do in the market," Dr Gilbert said.

"They've got more value in what you can use them for than what they could be sold for."

Terrorist's white supremacist ideology a possible barrier

The terrorist's white supremacist ideology could also have acted as a further barrier to engaging with most of New Zealand's criminal gang network, he said.

"Those types of white power groups now are fairly few and far between and even the size of the chapters means that you may not have those options," he said.

"Traditionally the Southern Vikings have had a very strong hold over the years down [in Dunedin] and they were part of what was called the Federation, sometimes called the Biker Federation, sometimes called the White Federation. But they are now incredibly small, in fact, they may be moribund."

The Road Knights in Invercargill also had links to white supremacists in the 1990s.

But even they might have disappeared by the time the terrorist was seeking firearms in 2017, Dr Gilbert said.

"It hasn't been a boom time for the gangs down there. What we've seen is the other gangs have filled that void, but they tend to be the Polynesian gangs or predominantly Polynesian gangs."

Dr Gilbert accepted it was possible for someone with white nationalist ideology to seek a firearm through white ethnic gangs, but it was a "fairly narrow" possibility.

"It would be a long game, particularly because if you've got nobody to vouch for you . . . without that it becomes tricky because if you get offside, and it doesn't take much, and you get some violence aimed your way, there's no coming back from that.

"They don't tend to give people second chances."