I’ve made it pretty clear in the past that even if you made guns illegal in the country, the chances of a government getting their hands on all the firearms are pretty slim.
Not so surprisingly, we can see this happening in real-time right now in New Zealand where a mandatory gun buyback was implemented by the country. As reported by the Daily Caller, it went about as well as you’d expect it would:
Despite a penalty of up to five years in prison, up to two-thirds of firearms banned by the legislation were not turned in before the Friday deadline by New Zealand gun owners, the Washington Post reported.
While 47,000 semi-automatic rifles have been collected, according to police statistics, a government commissioned study determined that the small nation likely contains between 56,000 and 170,000 now banned weapons, according to 1 News.
New Zealand’s largest gun rights advocacy group, the Licensed Firearms Owners Council, remarked that the buyback program has been an “unmitigated failure.”
Police Minister Stuart Nash blamed the government’s inability to enforce its buyback scheme on a lack of gun registration. “The problem is we just don’t know exactly how many guns are out in the community, this is why we need a register, to enable Police to better track firearms,” he said, according to 1 News.
Did you catch that?
The government threatened prison time for anyone who possesses an illegal firearm, but the government has no idea who has one or how many they have total. It’s kind of hard to confiscate guns and make your nation a “gun-free” zone if you have no idea where they are.
New Zealand’s government thought they were making the country a safer place, but what they’ve really done is turned a bunch of guns into ghosts they can’t see or catch. If gun owners weren’t that into bringing their guns into the daylight, they certainly won’t be showing them around now. All the government did was push them further into the shadows where the only way they’ll come upon them is if they get lucky.
It’s that level of genius that makes one question handing any power over to the government whatsoever. People forget that politicians are generally people who are good at winning popularity contests, not thinking through things logically. Sometimes, the logic costs them their office and they can’t have that.
This may be asking too much, but I’m hoping the left in America is paying attention to what’s happening in New Zealand. I’m hoping that they come to understand those mandatory buybacks and gun confiscations are about as likely to make the country gun-free as sticking your hand in a blender will give you a perfect manicure.
Americans don’t register their guns either and not only that, we buy them constantly. The amount of firepower in the civilian sector rivals our own military force multiple times over. Just this last Black Friday, Americans bought enough guns to arm the Marine Corps., and that’s not the first time I’ve read that kind of headline during a holiday season.
(READ: The Amount of Guns Sold on Black Friday Is Staggering)
And that’s how we like it here in America. I like the idea that between me and my civilian neighborhood, we could storm a beachhead and still have some ammo left over to go to the range with the following day. I like that I have that sense of safety, and I like that my government has that sense of fear about it.
I’d like to keep it that way.
Regardless, the government is going to continue to try to disarm us, if not all at once, then little by little. However, as I described in one of my previous videos, that’ll never happen.
But even without me explaining why it wouldn’t work, we can already see what a buyback looks like in America, thanks to J.B. Wogan of Governing.com, who wrote on how Seattle’s gun buyback affected the gun crime in that city:
Studies in Seattle and Sacramento in 1994 and 1998 suggested that the type of people selling their firearms — relatively few young men, for instance — didn’t resemble the general gun-owning population and weren’t likely to commit gun crimes. In Seattle, there appeared to be no statistically significant change in gun-related homicides after its gun buyback. A 2002 study in Milwaukee found that handguns sold back to local police didn’t fit the profile of handguns used in homicides. Buybacks, the studies seemed to say, don’t work.
Why don’t they work? John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center tells us why.
“1) Most of the guns sold don’t work. 2) It is possible that the gun buyback programs actually allow those giving up the guns to buy money to buy working guns. 3) The gun buyback program can actually help criminals get rid of guns that they have used in crime and to get rid of them in a way that allows them to make some money off them,” wrote Lott.
So not only are people not turning in their guns, criminals are using the system to get funds for guns that do work or are getting rid of the evidence. The government is essentially helping criminals propagate gun crime.
If the left is wise (they’re not) they’ll just leave the people and their guns alone.
