By John Boch via TTAG

Law abiding gun owners don’t appreciate being made to pay for the sins of a few unstable, crazy individuals. Particularly those who openly state that their intent is to bring about more gun control and limits on the right to keep and bear arms. As the Christchurch mosque shooter wrote in his 74-page rambling manifesto,

I chose firearms for the affect (sic) it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the affect it could have on the politics of United states (sic) and thereby the political situation of the world.

Gun-grabbing politicians just can’t help themselves, though. So in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s goverment reflexively moved to give the shooter exactly what he said he wanted.

But a funny thing happened on the way to full and unquestioned confiscation compliance. As Reason’s J.D. Tudcille writes,

Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand’s government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in.

Huh. Imagine that.

The Mercury News reports:

…The government, meanwhile, is faced with a sobering set of challenges over how to enforce the new law. There is no national registry for many of the weapons targeted by the ban, including the AR-15 — a semiautomatic rifle that has been used in mass shootings in the United States and is often at the center of American gun-control debates. As a result, estimates of the numbers of newly banned weapons vary widely. So far, about 700 firearms have been voluntarily surrendered.

New Zealand’s laissez-faire pre-Christchurch approach to gun regulation means authorities are going to have a very difficult time identifying what firearms Kiwis own.

Traditionally relaxed in its approach to firearms regulation, and enjoying a low crime rate, New Zealand has no firearms registration rule. That means authorities have no easy way of knowing what guns are in circulation or who owns them. “These weapons are unlikely to be confiscated by police because they don’t know of their existence,” Philippa Yasbek of Gun Control NZ admitted. “These will become black-market weapons if their owners choose not to comply with the law and become criminals instead.”

This is exactly why gun rights advocates in the US have argued for years that registration is just a precursor to confiscation. It doesn’t prevent crimes and there’s literally no other reason for it.

Interestingly, gun grabbers in New Zealand (like many in America) look towards Australia for what they see as the model of a successful gun confiscation. However, the dirty little secret from Oz is that only about 20% of the banned guns were surrendered back in the 1990s.

You read that right. Roughly 640,000 banned Australia self-loading firearms were surrendered/sold/confiscated and about 2.5 million remain in circulation, despite serious criminal penalties for unauthorized possession.

Law-abiding New Zealanders are just the latest population of gun owners to decide that they’d prefer to hold onto their guns after all, thank you very much. The fact that the country’s criminal element had already announced that they have no plans to comply might have played a part in that decision, too.

So, just like firearm owners in Australia (not to mention places like Connecticut, New Yorkand California) before them, Kiwis are choosing massive non-compliance over politicians’ promises of rainbow-spangled safety thanks to a gun-free future for all.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms sees a lesson in all of this for American politicians (not that they’re likely to listen).