The effort to ban certain semiautomatic firearms in New Zealand has hit considerable resistance, according to Reason Magazine, and a leading U.S. gun rights organization spelled out why in a Monday news release: The notion that gun owners are simply going to hand over their firearms might be wishful thinking.
According to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Democrat presidential candidates now running on strong gun control platforms should pay close attention to the lesson now being learned in New Zealand.
“From poll leader Joe Biden down to last place Washington Gov. Jay Inslee,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “every Democrat running has offered some new degree of gun control to include bans on many semiautomatic firearms. But New Zealanders, who don’t even enjoy a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in their constitution, are balking at the notion of turning in their firearms.”
According to Reason, only about 700 firearms in a nation where there are an estimated 1.5 million guns have been turned in under the government’s strict new gun policies. The new regulations were adopted in response to the Christchurch massacre in March, when a lone killer opened fire on two mosques where worshippers were gathered for prayers.
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“When a government starts penalizing law-abiding citizens for crimes they didn’t commit,” Gottlieb observed, “it’s up to those citizens to resist. We understand there are legal challenges in the works, and we support that.”
Even gun control advocates in New Zealand admit that it may be difficult to round up the affected guns because there is no registry.
Philippa Yasbek of Gun Control NZ has acknowledged that, “These will become black-market weapons if their owners choose not to comply with the law and become criminals instead,” the Reason article noted.
Now what? That would be pure speculation at this point, but CCRKBA’s Gottlieb suggested that there is a lesson for anti-gun politicians in this country, in what’s not been happening in New Zealand.
“Here in the United States,” he contended, “where we have the Second Amendment as the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, anybody who seriously believes the citizens will line up to just hand over their guns may be too delusional to be president.”
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