Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Interesting Thoughts from Middle Earth

This is an interesting gun registration piece out of New Zealand, one of my favorite places in the world:
"With Gary Mauser attending the ANZSOC conference in Wellington this week, politicians, justice officials and police will be able to receive first-hand information as to why gun registration is the ultimate in political folly," claims Peter Linton, Libertarianz spokesman for Firearm Deregulation.

Mauser has studied the fiasco of the clumsy attempt to register firearms in Canada, the evidence showing it is a financial calamity threatening to engulf the current Canadian Government:

Costs have escalated from a projected $2 Million to a current $2 Billion, and no evidence can be found to show that the Gun Registry has accomplished anything of value.

Violent crime & suicide rates remain constant in Canada, even though they are falling in the US. The homicide rate is falling faster in the US than in Canada.

So far, NZ seems largely immune to the gun control disease that afflicts much of the old Empire. My favorite NZ story is when I was staying with a friend of a friend in a small town on the North Island. My host was giving me a hard time on how many handguns there were floating around in the States. I got up from the dinner table and walked over to his gun cabinet, opened it, and took out a .22 rifle fitted with a sound suppressor — all his small rifles were fitted with "silencers," which he'd bought for about $25 USD apiece at the local hardware store. "This," I said, pointing to the suppressor, "would be guaranteed time in the federal slammer back home. No deposit; no return."

"Get out!" my friend said. "That's just simple courtesy for the neighbors, not to mention easier on the old ears. You can't mean they're illegal in the states?"

Different countries; different laws...

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