New Zealand: NZ Will Take Guns From Citizens, But Not Gangs :: 07/05/2020

Following the Christchurch massacre, the country of New Zealand began a jihad against the AR-15 and similar style rifles. They wanted to purge them from the nation, tripping over themselves to disarm their populace who did nothing wrong, simply because of the actions of one deranged individual. It’s a scene we’ve watched play out other places, but it was no less painful.

Yet, it seems that while government officials were quite ready to disarm law-abiding citizens, they’re more reticent about efforts to disarm gangs throughout the nation.

Police Minister Stuart Nash has refused to back law changes that would keep guns out of the hands of gangs in New Zealand, National’s Police spokesperson Brett Hudson says.

“My Member’s Bill, Arms (Firearms Prohibition Orders) Amendment Bill, was set down for first reading. Nash had come out earlier and stated that Labour would not support this bill.

“Gang firearm related incidents have continue to increase as the number of gang members in New Zealand has increased. In the first ten weeks of 2020 there was 156 incidents of firearms offences committed by gang members or associates.

“The aim of my Member’s Bill is to combat issues like this and take firearms away from those who pose great danger to public safety.

Now, in fairness, this bill sounds like a New Zealand version of a red flag law, which is bad news. I don’t like the idea of any law that takes guns from people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.

However, I find it amusing that the specified target of this measure are gang members while officials in this same government took the vehemently anti-gun position of disarming law-abiding citizens, stripping them of certain semi-automatic rifles simply because of what one person did with such a thing.

Then again, most anti-gun politicians don’t really care all that much about disarming criminals. If they did, they wouldn’t spend so much time trying to disarm the law-abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong. They wouldn’t pass laws that punish the victims of gun thefts, either.

Oh no, they don’t really mind armed criminals. That may well be because armed criminals create the havoc these politicians need to sway voters to oppose the right to keep and bear arms.

“The Second Amendment is American, though, it’s not applicable in New Zealand,” some might say.

To them, I’ll point out that while the Second Amendment doesn’t apply beyond our shores, the right enshrined in it is a basic human liberty, one that should be protected all throughout the planet. Just because it’s not has zero impact on the reality of what it is. Our Founding Fathers didn’t create liberties out of whole cloth. They simply tried to protect the liberties we all have by virtue of being human.

But if we’re going to disarm a group of people, we should all be able to agree that it should probably be criminals. I mean, just for the sake of argument.

However, it seems New Zealand has very different priorities.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He's also the host of Unloaded TV on YouTube. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/07/05/guns-from-citizens-but-not-gangs/