As a follow-up to the insulting, aggressive, and ineffectual attacks on free speech and self-defense that were her “response to” the March 15 murders of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has taken a great leap forward in the annals of 21st Century state tyranny.
She has proposed a statute that will designate the right to keep and bear arms as a “government-provided privilege.”
Michael Tennant, of The New American, explains:
The victims of the March mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, had hardly been buried when gun-grabbing politicians rammed through stricter firearms laws. Now they’re at it again, aiming to “enshrine in law that owning a firearm is a privilege and comes with an obligation to demonstrate a high level of safety and responsibility,” in the words of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
And in doing so, she employed the same species of rhetoric that 20th Century despots employed when demonizing gun-owners and attempting to disarm the peacefully-minded citizenry.
Stuart Nash, the government’s Police Minister, sycophantically echoed her forbidding threat.
Under the current law, we do not know exactly how many guns are in circulation, who owns them, who is selling them, who is buying them, or how securely they are stored against the risk of theft or misuse.
And, Minister, you never will, for the simple fact that criminally-minded people want guns, black markets always circumvent statutes, and criminally-minded people are, as a result -- and as has been shown over and over again in history and even in contemporary America -- going to get the guns.
As Jon Miltimore reported for IntellectualTakeOut.org:
Lawful gun owners accounted for just 18 percent of gun violence, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. Researchers analyzed 762 cases in which a gun was recovered by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Firearm Tracking Unit (FTU). Most perpetrators (79%) were carrying a gun that did not belong to them,’ researchers concluded.
And for that simple reason, peacefully-minded New Zealanders who have learned from history are already resisting your gun mandates.
Just days after the Christchurch attacks, PM Arden announced her own, executive branch “ban” on semiautomatic rifles, something that The New American’s Bob Adelman noted at the time:
Ardern announced the ban before the legislation had even been written. Included in her announcement (and presumably in the legislation, when it is written and passed by the compliant Parliament) will be a gun “buy-back” program to relieve gun owners of their firearms that will be criminalized under the legislation.
Indeed, the “buy-back” program was passed a few short weeks later, which allowed perspicacious folks in New Zealand and elsewhere to observe two things.
First, politicians lie when soft-labeling mandatory gun confiscation and small state payouts as “buy-backs.” In fact, the government never owned the guns in the first place.
Second. The vast, vast majority of New Zealand’s gun owners did not turn in their guns.
As JD Tuccille writes for Reason, despite fawning news coverage, statistics showed that only 700 of the 1.5 million guns owned by New Zealanders were handed in shortly after the confiscation – er, sorry, I mean “buy back” – became an executable statute. That’s .00046 percent of the guns in the nation of 4.6 million people.
And the peacefully-minded “Kiwis” who didn’t turn in their firearms were fortunate that, until now, New Zealand’s politicians have never mandated they register their guns.
The New American’s Tennant explains that Arden’s flashy new proposal is intended to end that, big time.
According to the New Zealand Herald, the newly proposed law, which will have to undergo the normal parliamentary process, calls for stricter licensing requirements for both gun dealers and gun owners, more frequent license renewals, a national gun registry, a ban on foreigners purchasing guns in the country, new licensing requirements for shooting clubs and ranges, restrictions on gun advertising, and ‘new offenses and higher penalties for breaking the rules.’
But the Australian man apprehended for committing the Christchurch murders clearly didn’t care about the statutes outlawing murder and assault, and he also broke an already extant statute forbidding high-capacity magazines. As Reuters reported in March:
Under New Zealand gun laws A-category weapons can be semi-automatic but limited to seven shots. Video of the gunman in the mosque showed a semi-automatic with a large magazine round.
And, of course, statistics show that not only do gun “bans” not stop criminally-minded people from acquiring guns, they show the profound relationship between the right to keep and bear arms and decreased rates of violent crime.
But that hasn’t stopped Arden and her ardent collectivists from grabbing for more state power. Now, shortly after sending a man to prison for nearly two years because he shared video of the Christchurch shootings, she proposes what people ought to recognize as the ultimate revelation of government’s true nature.
The state is now a predator, existing at the expense of your rights.
Free speech doesn’t exist in Orwellian New Zealand. And plenty of other Westerners, from French politicians, to left-wing American journalists, to American blowhards like Barack Obama (who wanted a “truthiness test” for the internet) and Kamala Harris are intent on making sure that only government-sanctioned speech will be allowed online.
They are bounding headlong on the path that Arden and her effete leftist thugs are breaking, a path that doesn’t just lead to tyranny, but is tyranny. It is the path that led to the largest slaughters of the 20th Century, all committed by collectivist regimes, and all committed after those regimes crushed free speech, registered firearms, and then ordered them handed in by certain “groups”, on the fallacious claim that the right to keep and bear arms is, somehow, a government-granted privilege.
Indeed, it seems the 20th Century tyrants would applaud NZ’s Arden:
‘The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.’ – Adolf Hitler
‘All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.’ – Mao Tse Tung.
And, finally, on the subject of inherent rights:
‘Our power does not know liberty or justice. It is established on the destruction of the individual will.’ – Lenin.
Todays politicians, singing accompany the echoes of the past.