UPDATED: Earlier this week we reported on the story of a Wellington woman who arrived home to her Hutt Valley property to find a box containing a rifle left on her doorstep by a courier.
For safety reasons, this weapon has now been removed and there are no firearms at the property.
The courier company are reviewing their processes and Police are also working with Trade Me to improve guidelines around online sales of firearms.
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A Wellington woman got a fright when she arrived home to find a package containing a gun left on her doorstep by an absent-minded courier.
It's yet another example of the unsafe delivery of firearms sent in the post.
When a gun is sent in the mail, the bolt is usually posted separately, so the firearm can't be used until it's in the right hands.
But in this case, the gun and the bolt were sent in the same box. By simply cutting through the tape and paper, this rifle is ready to be loaded and fired.
One Wellington woman came home to find all this outside her house.
"I caught sight of a box leaning up against the front door and thought, 'Well we're waiting for this gun to arrive', and I thought, 'Surely it hasn't just been left on our doorstep?'," she says.
Her identity has been kept secret as she doesn't want people to know her family owns guns, or that one of them had been left lying around her house by a Fastway Courier.
"I was just so angry that something had been left there when it clearly stated, 'Signature required'," she says. "Nobody was home to sign it and it had been sitting there probably most of the day."
When her husband bought the gun on TradeMe he did everything right -- he filed the paperwork and got approval from police.
But she says both the seller and the courier got it wrong.
"You start thinking of all the things that could have gone wrong and then you think, 'How is this legal?'"
"How can you just leave a firearm on somebody's doorstep?"
Fastway says the seller of the gun didn't tell them what he was sending which is against the law.
It admits the courier who delivered the firearm messed up -- failing to get a signature is against its strict policy -- and insists it's a one-off mistake.
But it's not the first time this has happened. A report by Story last October exposed other courier companies making similar mistakes.
And the Stokes Valley resident says this story could have had a very different outcome.
"There's a lot of kids around this area, a lot of youth issues at the moment going on, a lot of burglaries happening at the moment," she says. "Our car got broken into this week."
Police have told Newshub they're in the process of speaking to everyone involved in this transaction.
They're now working out new guidelines with TradeMe to make it a requirement for bolts and rifles to be sent separately in future online sales.
Newshub.
