11/20/2006

Criminal charges for self-defense in New Zealand: Dangerous gun lock laws

What are you supposed to do when someone is threatening to attack you with a machete? Call the police and hope that they arrive in time? Should the victim here have behaved passively and given the crazy guy with a machette the guns that he was demanding?

Greg Carvell, 33, is a firearms dealer and father of two.

He is facing a criminal charge after he shot and wounded a man inside his father's shop.

The man, 29-year-old Ricky Beckham, allegedly entered the shop brandishing a machete, demanding a gun and making threats to kill.

Carvell and shop manager Bruce Motley were in the office at the time working on orders.

"He [Beckham] was waving [the machete] around in the air saying 'I'm going to kill you'," says Motley.

Carvell says he reacted the only way he could. He grabbed a semi-loaded pistol kept in the office drawer and repeatedly demanded Beckham put down the machete.

He eventually shot him in the stomach.

"Then when he [Beckham] started screaming 'give men the guns or I'll kill you' and then he come at Greg and Greg fired. [Greg] lowered his gun deliberately from his chest area to a place where he was going to wound him," says Greg's father and shop owner Ray Carvell.

Ray Carvell, who was not on the premises at the time, believes the ramifications of inaction would have been much greater.

"If he [Beckham] did get out there and he started killing people with these things...it would be terrible. I couldn't live with myself if this happened I can tell you that now," he says.

Motley also believes Greg did the right thing.

"I don't see he had any other option to do what he did otherwise probably both of us would have been sliced up...No doubt at all," he says.

Now almost four months later Greg Carvell faces a criminal charge, which if proven in court carries a possible prison sentence of up to four years.

He faces a charge under the Firearms Act, not for the shooting, but for unlawfully possessing the firearm which was used in the shooting. . . .

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

He grabbed a semi-loaded pistol kept in the office drawer

Uh, what's a semi-loaded pistol? Once again, the journalists are clueless.

11/22/2006 1:54 PM  

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