Why No Amount Of Gun Control Could Possibly Work

I’m certain you remember the Christchurch mosque shooting that happened in New Zealand earlier this year, where 51 people were lost to a hateful bigot. In the response to the shooting, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that the country’s gun laws “will change” and implemented a mandatory gun buy-back program targeting “military-style semi-automatic” weapons, with definitions that would include most pistols as well.
 
But surprise, surprise, virtually no one is giving up their guns. Reason, a conservative news outlet, reports that only 700 weapons have been turned in since the program began. That’s out of a possible total of 1.5 million firearms in the country (though it’s uncertain how many of those weapons fall under the established category of “military-style semi-automatic” weapons).
 
Philippa Yasbek of Gun Control NZ said: “These weapons are unlikely to be confiscated by police because they don’t know of their existence. These will become black-market weapons if their owners choose not to comply with the law and become criminals instead.”
 
And therein lies one of the biggest problems with gun control and why it doesn’t work: there is no effective way of enforcing the law. Establishing gun buy-back programs hardly works as most people would rather not surrender their personal defense weapons. Just look at Australia’s gun buy-back program. Often times, advocates of gun control will point to that as a good example of gun control working. For what reason, I am not certain, as it is estimated that only 20% of banned weapons were turned in. And like New Zealand’s, Australia’s was also mandatory, not optional (not that anyone cares, as it seems).
 
In effect, no gun buy-back program can actually be mandatory because there is no way to enforce it. The police would need to spend a ton of resources and money going house to house searching for weapons (which would also likely be rather ineffective, not to mention a massive violation of people’s rights, but that hardly matters to an authoritarian regime) because they don’t know where each particular type of weapon is. In the meantime, this gives nefarious people ample opportunity to commit heinous crimes like the one perpetrated by the bigot who killed over 50 people in a mosque.
 
Which brings me to the other major reason as to why gun control doesn’t work: criminals couldn’t care less about the law anyway.
 
A New Zealand news outlet even reported that gang leaders publicly stated they wouldn’t be giving up their weapons in accordance to the “mandatory” buy-back program. The only people that would actually follow the program are those the government doesn’t have to worry about: the law-abiding populace. So this puts innocent, law-abiding people at a massive disadvantage against those who couldn’t care less about laws.
 
In case this was not made aware to the New Zealand PM or anyone else in the government, MURDER IS ILLEGAL! That sure as hell didn’t stop the Christchurch shooter, did it? That doesn’t stop other evil people from committing that same crime, does it? Of course, that isn’t to say that murder ought to be made legal. That would be absolutely insane. But that is to make the point that criminals, by definition, don’t follow the law.
 
Is it really any surprise that gang leaders, or any other criminals, would not follow the gun buy-back program? Did the PM really expect criminals to say “gee, our wonderful and great Prime Minister is making a lot of sense here. I have been entirely reformed of my egregious ways of criminality and will follow this clearly well-thought-out mandatory gun buy-back program because I am now a better person”? Is the NZ PM Dora the Explorer or something? Because you would have to be a little girl in fantasy land to believe something like that would occur.
 
Criminals, as I have said COUNTLESS times in the past, don’t care about the law. Taking away people’s guns only puts them in serious danger and at a serious disadvantage because all of a sudden, someone that wants to do something bad has their gun, but those who abide by the law then find themselves without a gun to protect themselves.
 
But of course, as we can see is the case in New Zealand and Australia (and really everywhere else that has a “mandatory” gun buy-back program), most people would rather run the risk of being labeled a criminal than run the risk of being left defenseless against a shooter. And in that case, if someone wishes to fight back and save some people’s lives, the good guy with a gun runs the risk of being put in prison FOR BEING A HERO! So the likelihood of someone running to the rescue is lessened, while the likelihood of someone going on a murderous rampage only increases.
 
Only take a look at the American city with the heaviest gun control legislations: Chicago. Do you want to know how that city spent its Fourth of July weekend? With 66 people shot and 5 killed. This is about on par with many weekends in Chicago in the past few years. A city where most law-abiding citizens find it extremely difficult to legally get a gun and most criminals laugh at the idiotic politicians that do them a favor in making their bloodbaths easier to perform.
 
And the argument that people are getting guns outside of Chicago falls flat because that also points out the flaws of gun control: why wouldn’t there be more death around Chicago than within it if gun control is supposed to end these sorts of massacres?
 
So no amount of gun control, even gun buy-back programs that are mandatory or even full-on confiscations actually work. They are heavily ineffective in terms of money and action, do more to harm people than help them, puts them in more danger than before, and most people would rather be labeled as criminals by their own government for wishing to protect themselves than run the risk of being totally defenseless in the unfortunate circumstance that they would actually need to have a gun.
 
Virtually no one wants to give up their guns because they know the sort of risk they run henceforth.
 
But I am curious to see where New Zealand goes from here. Obviously, the PM’s ever-so-popular-with-the-media-and-people-who-don’t-know-jack plan to force people to return their guns for some sort of monetary exchange has failed. And I doubt the PM would be in any way willing to reverse course and be more lax on gun control in the future. Will we see heavier action against guns by the NZ government, or simply inaction until the next shooting happens? Either way, whatever action the New Zealand government takes in the future, if it is to implement more gun control legislation, it will be entirely ineffective in a number of ways.
 
Proverbs 28:16
“A ruler who lacks understanding is a cruel oppressor, but he who hates unjust gain will prolong his days.”
 
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