When the Christchurch massacre took place, New Zealand acted. They responded to what happened the same way American anti-gunners would have us react. They banned AR-15s and went on a rampage of stomping on the gun rights of folks there.
Of course, New Zealand doesn’t have a Second Amendment. There’s no protection of gun rights. In fact, gun rights aren’t even acknowledged as rights there, which is a bit of an issue as well.
However, right now, the biggest issue is how the country tripped over itself passing gun control, yet absolutely none of it worked.
Gun control laws disarm victims, not criminals. That’s common sense to everyone but the politicians who promise peace, rainbows and dancing unicorns if only you’ll give up your firearms.
New Zealand’s gun control advocates — including Prim Minister Jacinda Ardern– remain slow on the uptake of that fundamental principle of life. In multiple gun confiscation drives, the Kiwi government grabbed most of the good guys’ guns. And now, a year after the final confiscation push, gun-related violence has reached new, record levels.
Try to suppress your shock and surprise.
Is it really that bad? Are the good folks over at The Truth About Guns spinning things a bit to make a point?
Actually, no, they’re not.
Rates of injury and death caused by firearms are tracking higher than ever before.
Data released by police under the Official Information Act shows 10 murder or manslaughter deaths in 2022, up until 31 July. There were 11 in total in 2021.
Injuries are also running at a record rate, on track to exceed 300 firearm-related injuries for the first time. In 2021, there were 298 gun-related injuries recorded by police, the highest ever.
Now, the numbers aren’t overly impressive, but we have to remember that New Zealand has a total population of just over 5 million people. If you put all of them together in one city, it would only be the second-largest city in the US by population.
Yet those 5 million are spread out over 103,000 square miles, which is enough to drive down the violent crime rates all by itself.
That said, comparing their numbers to ours is silly. Other countries aren’t the United States and vice versa. When looking at the impact of gun control, one thing you have to look at are the trends from before and after its passage.
Prior to Christchurch, New Zealand’s homicide rate was pretty low. In fact, the 49 people killed in that massacre were enough to produce a nearly 254 percent increase in the homicide rate that year, which is kind of telling all on its own.
Yet since then, we’re clearly seeing homicides increase as well as violent crime as a whole. That’s likely because criminals no longer have much reason to fear ordinary citizens. They can kill as they want with impunity because no one is there to stop them.
Oh, sure, the police may come looking for them, but few criminals believe they’ll be caught. They tend to think that if no one is there to prevent a crime, no one will know who did it. That’s not quite true, as we know, but that’s how they tend to think.
New Zealand gave those criminals a gift.
What’s more, American gun grabbers want to give our own criminals the same gift. However, the carnage here would be orders of magnitude worse by virtue of this country simply being more violent. Take away good guys’ guns and watch how the bodies pile up.
If it’s happening in New Zealand, there’s not a shred of doubt that it would happen here.
And this is what gun control got them.
Even if you dismiss gun control as causing this issue, you cannot ignore that it did nothing to prevent it, which is par for the course and why it’s so infuriating that people still push it.
