American gun owners would do well to keep an eye on the gun control policies in the rest of the first world. After we watch those governments disarm their own citizens, we’ll have their playbook and can watch for similar plays on our own soil.
Last week, we watched as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau used a mass killing to justify banning over 1,500 different types of guns. This affected more than 100,000 Canadian gun owners. Nobody really mentioned that the man was already legally banned from owning a firearm–or that almost half his victims weren’t even shot, but were killed in arson attacks.
Now New Zealand’s government has taken one more step in the path towards totalitarianism. Gun owners will remember how Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her cohorts rammed through a gun ban in only six days after one leftist eco-terrorist shot and killed 49 people in March of 2019.
The Latest Bad News For NZ Gun Owners
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s gun buyback program ended last December. The whole thing was an abysmal failure, but we digress. But when gun owners went to turn in their guns, they were also told to hand in their ammunition.
That wasn’t part of the edict, and gun owners weren’t compensated for their ammunition. The Council of Licensed Firearms Owners brought a lawsuit on behalf of gun owners who were collectively out tens of thousands of dollars.
But a the High Court heard arguments this week that said the government doesn’t need to compensate gun owners.
The Government’s legal team argued that the “Government extinguished all property rights of any kind” for gun owners when it brought in gun law reform last year.
And it got worse! The legal team said that they didn’t even have a legal obligation to compensate gun owners for their GUNS and only did so as a kindness. Their claim was that the government only has to compensate for confiscation private property if they’re going to USE the private property. And since the guns weren’t going to be used by the government, no compensation was required.
Crown lawyer Austin Powell said, “If the property is taken for a purpose it is an acquisition and it must be compensated, and in New Zealand law, most often, it is.”
Unchecked Power Grab
This line of thinking is just preposterous! Taking away hundreds of thousands of guns WAS for a purpose, according to the government: making society safer, remember? That’s the line of crap you fed gun owners!
Just because those guns didn’t get handed to the military doesn’t mean that the government didn’t take them for any purpose!
Imagine this: some lunatic uses his car to run into a crowd of people and kills several bystanders. The government bans all cars, but since they’re not going to put the cars to use as police cars or school buses, no compensation is owed to the owners!
But even aside from the flimsy sham excuse that ‘if we’re not using it, we don’t have to compensate you’ the bigger picture is even worse.
In New Zealand, the government’s official legal team is saying that private property rights don’t exist if the government says they don’t.
And this wasn’t lost on the pro-gun side. A spokeswoman for the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, Nicole McKee, said as much:
“Minister Nash had the power to introduce a compensation scheme just as he had done for firearms. But he chose not to and has left thousands of everyday hunters and shooters picking up the bill. Kiwis expect a fair go from their government – if they stop you using your property, we rightfully expect compensation.”
But here’s the private property rights angle that is far more important than even lost compensation:
“If the Government wins this case, it will set a very dangerous precedent for New Zealand. It will mean future governments will be able to deny the value of private property either by ordering its destruction or confiscation, meaning individual New Zealanders would have to wear the loss.”
Americans, take note! This is how the left is playing the game. It’s time for us to start playing hardball here in the United States, because our leftist leaders would love to pass these same laws.