Gun Control Groups “Seizing Momentum” Should Consider What’s Happening In New Zealand

“Gun control” is all about punishing law abiding citizens for the actions of criminals by disarming the law abiding, while doing nothing to the criminals

‘People are fed up’: After El Paso and Dayton shootings, gun-control groups seize momentum

Nearly two weeks after back-to-back mass shootings killed at least 31 people and injured dozens more in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, gun-control groups are pushing lawmakers to act on long-dormant gun policy measures.

And this time, activists say, momentum is on their side.

That’s thanks in large part to a burst of grass-roots organizing around the country. About 20,000 members of the Brady Campaign have called, emailed or collected signatures over the last two weeks asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to call the Senate back from recess to take emergency action on gun legislation.

This weekend, thousands of volunteers with Moms Demand Action, the grass-roots arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, will hold rallies in all 50 states to urge senators to expand background-check laws and “red flag laws,” which would allow law enforcement or others to take a person’s firearms away if they are deemed a danger.

Thank you for illustrating why Americans shouldn’t trust that your red flag law won’t be used arbitrarily to violate our rights. https://t.co/3ffE0gNwz5

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) August 13, 2019

And therein lies the problem with those Red Flag laws unless they are crafted to be very specific by Congress, and punish those civilly and criminally who make frivolous claims. Cuomo make have melted down, but, should his guns be taken? Who knows, let’s take them and hold a hearing! Right? That’s the way many RF laws work already.

“The fact that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are openly discussing universal background checks and other gun-safety measures that we support is a powerful signal about the pressure” they feel from gun-safety groups, said Peter Ambler, executive director of the advocacy group Giffords.

The thing is, we’d be open to certain common sense (not Common Sense, as they use) measures, but, we mostly aren’t willing to allow passage of anything because we know that these are just steps towards gun bans. To complete disarmament. How’s that working out in New Zealand?

(USA Today) New Zealand banned most automatic and semi-automatic weapons and components that modify existing weapons in the immediate wake of the shooting that left 51 people dead and scores injured at two mosques in March.

The country also established a buy-back program to allow gun owners to be compensated for turning in their weapons.

Since the voluntary program began in July, 10,242 firearms have been handed into police, and another 1,269 firearms have been handed in under an amnesty program, which allows people to turn in their guns without any questions about how or when they obtained them.

Hooray, gun grabbing! Wait, hooray?

(Reason) Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand’s government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in.

Officials should have seen it coming.

“Police are anticipating a number of people with banned firearms in their possession won’t surrender them,” Stuff reported at the end of May, based on internal government documents.

As of last week, only around 700 weapons had been turned over. There are an estimated 1.5 million guns—with an unknown number subject to the new prohibitionon semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall.

Because of New Zealands previously low key regulations, there was no registration, so the government mostly doesn’t know who has what. Many Democrats yammer about the “Australian solution”, as they did during the 2016 campaign

“In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities,” wrote Franz Csaszar, professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, after Australia’s 1996 compensated confiscation of firearms following a mass murder in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Csaszar put the number of illegally retained arms in Australia at between two and five million.

Think we’ll turn them in?