It was meant to be a symbolic moment: Kash Patel, newly appointed FBI Director of the Trump administration, traveled to Wellington at the end of July to inaugurate the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand. With a red ribbon, camera flashes and a handshake among allies, he wanted to celebrate the alliance with a core member of the “Five Eyes.” But the gift Patel presented to the country’s top security chiefs turned out to be a diplomatic blunder of bizarre dimensions.
Instead of medals or commemorative coins, Patel brought three of New Zealand’s most powerful men - Police Commissioner Richard Chambers, intelligence chief Andrew Hampton (NZSIS) and the director of the technical intelligence agency Andrew Clark (GCSB) - something that under the country’s strict gun laws not even private citizens are allowed to possess: 3D-printed pistols, embedded in decorative display stands. For Patel it seemed to be a friendly present, a gesture of military camaraderie. For New Zealand’s authorities, however, it meant a legal minefield.
Because in a country that has drastically tightened its gun laws since the Christchurch massacre in 2019, pistols are considered particularly strictly regulated. They may only be owned with special permits that even many police officers do not have. 3D-printed weapons are legally treated as functional firearms as soon as they could theoretically be made operable again. And that is exactly what New Zealand’s gun regulators ruled: the gifts from the FBI Director were potentially operable - and therefore had to be confiscated and destroyed.
Police Commissioner Chambers later soberly announced that he had ordered the destruction of the pistols to ensure compliance with firearms law. What Patel understood as a gesture thus became an affront - a lesson in how differently two democracies deal with the issue of weapons. While in the United States gun ownership is considered an enshrined right, in New Zealand it is a legally limited privilege. And there, where rifles are used at most in rural areas for pest control, a pistol as a gift appears not honorable but inappropriate.
The irony of it all: a former FBI agent, now head of an NGO for integrity within the Bureau, called Patel’s gift an “honest gesture,” but also an example of cultural blindness. For the New Zealand public, who are not used to seeing police officers armed in everyday life, it could hardly have been more unfortunate. That Patel at the same time hinted in his speech that the new office was intended to curb China’s influence in the South Pacific only amplified the diplomatic scandal. Wellington responded politely but firmly: the FBI was primarily there to cooperate on child pornography and drug trafficking, not as a geopolitical spearhead. In Beijing, on the other hand, Patel’s words immediately triggered sharp criticism. Thus a step that was actually pragmatic - strengthening the transatlantic intelligence alliance - became a demonstration of how quickly symbolism can slip into blunders. From a ribbon cutting turned into 3D pistols that in a country without a gun fetish could only be understood as a provocation. From a friendship ceremony it became an aftermath with shredding machines in which Patel’s gifts disappeared. What remains is the image of an FBI Director who did not understand the cultural fault lines of his partners - and thus left more scorched earth than any speech about “warrior ethos” could mend.
Investigative journalism requires courage, conviction – and your support.
Please support our journalistic fight against right-wing populism and human rights violations. We do not want to finance our work through a paywall, so that everyone can read our investigations – regardless of income or background.
English 
German 
