Look at New Zealand’s gun confiscation by a Canadian

The Canadian government announced a ban/buyback on over 1,500 “assault-type weapons”.  This is modeled on New Zealand’s ban/buyback (okay, “confiscation” to be accurate.) Here’s a viewpoint from a Canadian writer of what’s up:

Like Canada, New Zealand has a substantial number of firearms and firearms owners: 26.3 firearms per 100 persons, compared to Canada’s 34.7. In 2019, in response to a tragic mass shooting in Christchurch, the government banned certain guns and implemented a buyback. Unlike Ottawa, however, which has focused its ban on specific “assault-style” firearms, New Zealand banned almost all semi-automatic firearms.

The buyback ran from June to December 2019 and involved confiscation of over 60,000 firearms, though New Zealand police have estimated the total number of prohibited firearms in the country might be as many as 240,000. The buyback wasn’t cheap. The government initially budgeted $16 million (in C$) for the administrative costs of the program. In the end, the country’s auditor general found, costs had almost doubled, to about $31 million. But that was just for administration. The cost of compensating gun owners was about $106 million, which works out to a per firearm price of about $1,800. Those numbers are for a country with a population of just over five million.

Note there are an estimated 300-400 million guns for our population of 330,000,000.

After the guns were bought and removed from the hands of New Zealanders, what happened to gun crime? Violent gun crime actually went up. During the decade before the buyback violent firearm offences averaged 932 a year. In 2019, the year of the buyback, there were 1,142 offences; in 2020, 1,156; in 2021, 1,338; and last year, 1,444. That’s up almost 55 per cent over the pre-ban decade.

Thought this was supposed to reduce gun crime, what? Still, Canada jumped in with both feet despite history:

The National Police Federation, the union that represents the RCMP, says Ottawa’s buyback is costly legislation that does not address current or urgent threats to public safety. “In fact,” the union says, “it diverts extremely important personnel, resources, and funding away from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”

What’s the likely cost of Ottawa’s buyback? In 2019, the government said it would be $200 million. But history and independent estimates suggest a much higher bill than that. The last major gun control program in Canada was the long-gun registry. The government initially promised it would only cost $2 million. The final tab was over $2 billion.

Financial Post

So Canada urinated 1000 times as much away $2,000,000,00 on their long-gun registry which didn’t work, and now wants to bilk their citizens for billions more to implement a failed New Zealand policy which only addressed 25% of their illegal weapons at a cost multiple times what the guns were worth – and still didn’t address the criminals who by definition aren’t going to obey the law anyway.

Expect the same from US politicians as soon as they get a chance – safe bets include Biden, Harris, Schumer, Newsom, Kennedy and every RINO in office.

Category: Canada, Crime, Gun Grabbing Fascists, Guns, Politics