The figures are in for New Zealand's "voluntary" gun "amnesty," and, well, anyone who understands gun ownership shouldn't be surprised.

Obviously, not everyone in New Zealand is onboard with the country's hastily thrown together new law to expropriate weapons in the name of protection from mass shootings. What that utterly miserable "530" figure shows is mass resistance, in response to the complete stupidity of blaming a mass shooting on the gun, not the foreign terrorist using the gun. That's what New Zealand's lefty parliament came up with in the wake of a hideous mass shooting at a Christchurch mosque last March by an Australian national. Instead of enacting legislation to, say, keep the likes of this nut out of their country, the Kiwis decided to target New Zealand's gun-owners in what was abusively called an "amnesty," suggesting they were the ones who did something wrong. With turn-ins amounting to a rounding error, it's obvious they're resisting.

When the gun grab was first announced, the press mendaciously reported that Kiwis were all in for this kind of expropriation and heaped tons of praise on the national character. An Agence France-Presse piece that ran in gun-controlled Singapore had particularly dishonest coverage here.

Now the news, delicately expressed by Stuff.co.nz, is that the rest of the gun-owners "might not surrender them." With a grand total of 530 in the hopper, ya think?

The press is reporting that the owners are awaiting compensation information, which apparently the first turn-ins don't qualify for, but even that has an "off" smell to it. According to Stuff.co.nz:

The Secretary of the Council of Licensed Firearm Owners, Nicole McKee, told NewstalkZB, the Government hasn't communicated their plans for prices for the buyback. "If they are being serious about their considerations and ensuring that there is fair and reasonable compensation, then firearm owners will wait a bit longer to make sure it is just and it is fair when it is received."

Umm, what happens if it's not just and fair, lady? When you have government telling you what it will pay for your gun, you don't have any say-so in whether the price is just or fair. This sounds as though she's trying to deflect the issue.

What's far more indicative, in fact, is that a one-day petition calling on the Legislature to think it through and not act hastily drew an instant 15,000-plus signatures. The dishonest AFP report claimed that those opposing the gun grab were from "the fringe element." Gotcha.

What we are seeing here is the folly of hastily enacted gun control in response to a traumatic event. Guns in New Zealand have never been the problem for the place. According to Nationmaster, New Zealand actually has more crime per capita than the U.S., but it has far less violent gun crime, which doesn't suggest that the problem there is gun-owners. When I think of New Zealand crime, it's usually a matter of how teenagers can get into trouble, or how trashy some characters can be. But it's not the doing of people who own guns and who use them responsibly. Now the gun control legislation is flashing big signals that it's not working. According to Stuff.co.nz, citing something more serious than activist press releases, the picture looks like this:

However, police are anticipating a number of people with banned firearms in their possession won't surrender them, according to documents obtained by Stuff in an OIA.

The result? The gun grab is a disaster. Not only does it falsely blame New Zealand's gentle, civil, rural, gun-oriented culture for the act of a foreign misfit who shouldn't have been let into the country in the first place, it now is leading to mass resistance. With one in four Kiwis believed to be gun-owners, according to the reports, as much as a quarter of the nation have become outlaws.

Kiwis are choosing this over the left's hasty gun grab, knowing that the full issue is about defending oneself, particularly in rural settings, and maintaining the New Zealand way of life. If the government wants to destroy that, which it does, well, then a nation of outlaws is the logical outcome.