I really don’t see how this reaction will have any real effect on curbing violence:
The estimated quarter of a million gun owners across this largely quiet, peaceful South Pacific country, many of them dedicated hunters, are bracing for what are likely to be significant reforms to New Zealand’s firearm laws. Leaders have hinted the changes will impact the proliferation and availability of semiautomatic weapons in particular.
The changes, agreed to in principle by the country’s coalition government Monday – just 72 hours after the deadliest act of gun violence in New Zealand history – put the country in line with others that have taken swift action following tragedy within their borders. Details of the changes will be announced within the week, and must be passed by parliament…
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern labeled the massacre “the worst act of terrorism on our shores” and immediately promised swift action, calling for gun laws to be changed. Her declarations have been celebrated by many in New Zealand, some of whom had no idea that military-style semiautomatic weapons were so prolific in a country famously known for its extremely low murder rate.
Let’s pause for a moment to scratch our heads in collective wonderment. I believe that even before my political change, even back when I was what I then considered to be a typical liberal, I would have found that last sentence rather odd. It seems to me that logic would dictate that if “military style semiautomatic weapons” (whatever “style” might mean) are so prolific in a country famous for its low murder rate, then the presence of military style semiautomatic weapons is unlikely to be the cause of a high murder rate. Plenty of other factors come into play.
Now, if New Zealand banned only that sort of weapon—however such weapons might ultimately be defined—it probably wouldn’t stop people from arming themselves, and so whatever deterrent value an armed populace presents would still be operating. But gun control enthusiasts rarely stop at one sort of weapon. Their goals are much bigger.
It goes almost without saying that criminals and terrorists will continue to get weapons, if not legally then illegally. But that doesn’t seem to be an argument that convinces gun control enthusiasts of much of anything, either. New Zealand may be just beginning to go down a well-worn road:
The Port Arthur massacre in Australia in 1996 shook the continent, changed gun legislation the Pacific nation, strictly restricting self-loading rifles and other weapons.
A buyback program destroyed thousands of guns and high-capacity magazines. A shooting at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, that same year also prompted a campaign for tighter restrictions on firearms, which led to a virtual ban on civilian ownership of handguns.
Great, just great. Disarm law-abiding citizens entirely, so that now the whole country is vulnerable. It’s not my impression that Scotland was especially riven by terrorism or violence to begin with, so this may not come back to haunt them. But it sounds mighty dangerous to me to disarm law-abiding people in general.
And then there’s the extreme of registering all firearms:
New Zealand, like the United States, also has no requirement for gun owners to register their weapons, unlike many countries in the world.
Again, there are ways to get weapons outside any system that requires registration. What’s more, registration is sometimes used by tyrannical regimes to perform a sweeping confiscation of a citizenry’s guns, in particular of the guns of these they deem enemies [see NOTE II below]. The Founders understood the importance of an armed populace; many modern people have failed to heed the warnings of history.
The New Zealand article ends this way:
The government’s decision, he said, has been in part motivated by the frequency of mass shootings in the United States, which has among the most lax gun laws in the world.
“There is a baseline determination not to go down the American road,” he said.
That presupposes, of course, that the US has a terrible record of gun shootings, and that the number here per capita is extraordinarily high compared to that of other countries, at least other first world countries not undergoing civil war. Ah, but with so many things, it depends how you choose to crunch those numbers:
Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31 percent to 1.43 percent. It also accounts for 2.1 percent of murders, and 2.88 percent of their attacks. All these are much less than the United States’ 4.6 percent share of the population.
Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
[NOTE I: We have reason to believe that more gun bans, and then a reaction to those gun bans, are what the shooter wished. More specifically, I’m talking about some quotes I read from his manifesto, which I’m finding difficult to find right now because Googling for anything connected with gun rights and this shooter seems to only yield a slew of articles about how New Zealand is stepping up its gun control efforts in the wake of the killings. If I had more time I could find the quote, but it was about his desire to inflame and further polarize the debates about gun control, and to ultimately spark an actual war between right and left over this issue and other issues such as immigration (a hot war rather than a cold one).]
[NOTE II: The question of how (and how effectively) the Nazis used the Weimar republic’s gun registration laws—laws meant to protect the Jews, actually—to disarm the Jews of Germany, as well as to disarm any group the Nazis thought would be a threat, has caused an enormous amount of debate. I’m not going to be covering the issue in any depth in this particular post, but I find the side that says the Nazis used the law quite effectively to be far more convincing. It’s a long, involved, complex debate, but I refer you to this shorter and this longer article, and to this for a summary of the critiques. It’s pretty fascinating stuff, by the way.]
[NOTE III: See this for a discussion of the current state of gun laws in New Zealand.]
