Once, they had pretty liberal gun laws there. Not on par with the US, mind you, but people could mostly have what they wanted with a few hurdles in the way, but no real roadblocks.

Then Christchurch happened and New Zealand started going gun control mad. They started enacting numerous restrictions, all billed as essential for keeping people safe.

The  problem is that New Zealand f***ed around and now they’re finding out.

Newshub can reveal firearms offences are on the rise despite tougher gun laws.

…

This .308 bolt action hunting rifle was purchased legally and is kept under lock and key so criminals can’t get to it.

It’s what responsible gun owners have always done and they say recent gun law changes haven’t worked.

“We continue to see gun crime rising, despite the fact that police and previous Governments have said that the new laws that affect licenced firearms owners are the key to reducing gun crime and keeping New Zealanders safe,” Council of Licenced Firearms Owners spokesperson Hugh Devereux-Mack said.

Among the many measures passed there is a gun registration scheme. Officials say 100,000 firearms have been registered since the law went into effect seven months ago.

And, unsurprisingly, anti-gunners there think it’s working.

Gun control advocate Philippa Yasbek said it’s a success.

“We need to be both licencing the people who use them and registering the firearms that are out there,” Yasbek said.

But figures obtained by Newshub show gun crime just keeps going up. In 2017 the average number of firearms offences per month was 387. In 2022, the average increased to 532 and last year it rose again to 547.

And all the while, police are losing the confidence of those who actually obey the law. In a new survey of more than 1000 licenced firearms owners conducted at the end of last year, Police received an average score of 1.3 out of 10 in its ability to balance the rights of legal gun owners against imposing controls to tackle illegal gun activity.

Shocker, right?

Despite all the gun control passed by the government, what we’re seeing in New Zealand actually tracks with what we’ve seen here in the United States.

Granted, violent crime is a complex issue, which means there’s more to the story than just gun laws on the books, but if the laws that were touted as being essential to preventing crime aren’t working, then they’re not working.

And why would they?

These laws really only apply to the law-abiding citizens there. I know they’re supposed to apply to everyone, but let’s be realistic here. Criminals aren’t going to obey it.

So, the good guys are registering guns and locking them up and doing all the things the gun control crowd bullied them into doing at the point of police guns and the bad guys are having a field day.

“It’s still better than the US,” someone might claim, but we can’t compare New Zealand’s crime rate to the United States’ because there are numerous other factors at play. Remember when I said crime was a complex issue?

What you have to do is look at before and after such laws go into effect to get an idea. It’s not perfect, though, so you have to look in a lot of other places, too. You need a lot of data points in order to find a trend, and we see those other data points here in the US.

So New Zealand has done all it could to hamstring the good guys, empowering the bad guys, and unsurprisingly, the gun control advocate calls it a success.

And they wonder why I can’t take any of them seriously.