Following the mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in March, that tiny island nation’s government swiftly – practically overnight – voted to ban firearms. They sent the police to confiscate the guns of everyone in an entire nation who had not used their guns to shoot up a mosque.
Every gun-owning “Kiwi” who woke up one morning as a law-abiding citizen, was a gun-owning criminal by the end of the day, because New Zealand’s Parliament and Prime Minister said so. “Turn in your guns, Mr. and Mrs. New Zealand!”
The Prime Minister was dead serious about this. You could tell because she was now wearing a hijab during every public appearance. The message: You might be the next mosque shooter in New Zealand, so it’s for everyone’s good that we’ll just take your guns away.
But then a strange thing happened. Virtually no one in New Zealand complied with the new law. Quiet civil disobedience was happening on a massive scale.
Two and a half months after guns were banned by New Zealand’s government, only 530 of the citizenry’s estimated 300,000 rifles were turned in. Compliance rates were pitiful: 0.001%.
Since New Zealand is a largely homogenous nation and it’s an island, it hasn’t suffered through a ton of mass shootings committed by first- and second-generation immigrants like the United States has. The last mass shooting that took place in New Zealand was in 1997. The people don’t seem to think it’s necessary to turn in their guns. Don’t they know there’s a law?!
Police in New Zealand are also suddenly realizing that the government made a seriously rookie mistake at its attempted tyranny. The government forgot to spend a few years creating a gun registry. Instead, they skipped straight to confiscation without figuring out where all of the guns were first. Dang it!
Chris Cahill with the New Zealand Police Association says, “We really have no idea how many of these firearms are out there in New Zealand. Which really points to how bad our firearms legislation has been, that we have let this get out of control.”
Ha!
Translation: “Dang it! We forgot to make a gun registry first!”
Notice what he thinks is “out of control” in that quote. He doesn’t mean mass shootings are out of control. New Zealand went 22 years without a mass shooting until the Christchurch incident. The thing that is “out of control” in the minds of New Zealand’s government tyrants is the fact that many citizens own guns, but the government doesn’t know who has them.
For those who don’t know, the Firearms Owner’s Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 is what currently sort of protects American gun owners from widespread government confiscation of firearms (and the Second Amendment, of course). FOPA prohibits the federal and supposedly state and municipal governments from compiling a registry of gun owners.
As most gun owners realize, registration historically always comes before confiscation, and confiscation always comes before formerly free people are forced on their knees in front of a ditch because they foolishly gave up their guns.
When a person buys a gun in America from a gun store or licensed dealer, they undergo a pointless and largely impotent federal background check. The federal government is supposed to destroy the records of all background checks within 24 hours, in order to prevent the creation of a registry. The Obama administration found a clever to circumvent that requirement for a few years, by simply ignoring the law and compiling a gun registry.
I wonder why Obama did that? It’s almost as if he and Hillary Clinton were planning something, but then Donald Trump came along and spoiled it!
I don’t know which part is funnier with the New Zealand situation: The fact that there is almost universal non-compliance with the illegitimate law, or the fact that the government really thought they could get away with it without first figuring out who all of the gun owners were.
I’ll bet that PVC pipe sales have been through the roof in New Zealand for the past few months! Not that Kiwis are hiding their guns away from the authorities or anything. Because as we all know, “They lost their guns in a freak canoe accident.” (Wink, wink)
