It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

I will not register.  Period.

Budget 2019: Money for gun buy-back scheme may not be enough (New Zealand):

Pullquote:

Police Association president Chris Cahill said it was a bit of unknown if the money would be enough because there had not been a gun registry.

“We really have no idea how many of these firearms are out there in New Zealand,” Cahill said.

“Which really points to how bad our firearms legislation has been, that we have let this get out of control.”

Hard to confiscate if you don’t know who owns what. That’s kind of the point.

UPDATE:

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 prohibition on semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall.

Traditionally relaxed in its approach to firearms regulation, and enjoying a low crime rate, New Zealand has no firearms registration rule. That means authorities have no easy way of knowing what guns are in circulation or who owns them.

“These weapons are unlikely to be confiscated by police because they don’t know of their existence,” Philippa Yasbek of Gun Control NZ admitted. “These will become black-market weapons if their owners choose not to comply with the law and become criminals instead.”

Yasbek’s organization advocates registering all guns in private hands. But that won’t help with gathering guns already in the possession of owners appalled by the government’s attack on the rights of innocent people—government attacks, it’s worth noting, that come in response to the crimes of one man who explicitly anticipated just such a response.

“I chose firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse,” the killer wrote in a document he released to explain his crimes. “The gun owners of New Zealand are a beaten, miserable bunch of baby boomers, who have long since given up the fight. When was the last time they won increased rights? Their loss was inevitable. I just accelerated things a bit.”

Politicians fulfilled the murderer’s predictions with panic-driven legislation.

That gun owners would, in large numbers, defy restrictions should have been anticipated by anybody who knows the history of government attempts to disarm their subjects—or who just glanced across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

“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.

“Many members of the community still possess grey-market firearms because they did not surrender these during the 1996–97 gun buyback,” the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission conceded in a 2016 report. “The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission continues to conservatively estimate that there are more than 260,000 firearms in the illicit firearms market.”

RTWT.

Quote of the Day – Democracy Edition

Via Instapundit:

In days gone by, superannuated elites refusing to accept defeat on existential questions of this type finished up with their heads on pikes. Democracy put a stop to that by doing what democracy does best: facilitating the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. But democracy means you elect a new parliament, not a new people. That, in truth, is the only deal that matters. – Helen Dale, Brexplaining the UK’s Future

 Today only Democrats and dictators fear elections.

Meanwhile in Climate News…

National Parks Quietly Toss Signs Saying Glaciers ‘Will Be Gone’ By 2020:

The National Park Service has quietly removed all the signs put up by the Obama administration that told visitors that the glaciers would “all be gone” by the year 2020 due to global warming… because… it’s 2019, and the glaciers are all still there and have been growing.

Glacier National Park quietly removed a sign at its visitor center saying the glaciers will disappear by 2020 which were originally placed because former President Obama believed the predictions pushed by the left’s climate change hypothesis.

According to federal officials, several years in a row of high snowfall and cold temperatures totally obliterated a computer model that authorities relied on to claim that the glaciers would all be melted by 2020, Daily Caller reported.

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