Kiwis are keeping their guns

Monday, July 15th, 2019

New Zealand has an estimated 1.5 million firearms. It’s not clear how many of those are semi-automatic, but it’s probably far, far more than the 700 that have been turned in under the new gun control scheme:

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.”

Comments

  1. TRX says:

    “not clear how many of those are semi-automatic”

    They shouldn’t wouldn’t worry about the semi-automatics. The shop where I bought my first machine gun was also a manufacturer; back in the early ’80s exported most of their production to New Zealand. At the time, the restrictions on full auto in NZ were nominal by comparison to US hassles.

    Just from that one gun shop, there are hundreds of Uzis, MACs, and M-16s in New Zealand…

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