If you thought that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would be satisfied with just a “mandatory buyback” of scary-looking semi-automatic firearms after the Christchurch mosque shootings, we have some “President Beto O’Rourke Welcomes You to the White House” t-shirts we’d like to sell you.

With Kiwis producing an unsurprisingly low compliance rate for the current confiscation buyback scheme, New Zealand’s powers that be realized they have a problem. Unlike Australia, NZ didn’t have a firearms registry. That means they have no way of knowing who owns what guns or how many of them. That also means they can’t go out and collect the newly-illegal firearms from people who choose not to participate in the, uh, mandatory buyback.

The simple solution: create a firearms registry!

We have only one question: why do the galaxy brains who run New Zealand’s government think the compliance rate with a registry will be much better than it is for the confiscation (see New York and California for relevant examples)?