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That worked well then

A while back, the government banned semi-automatic guns in NZ.

This was a knee-jerk reaction to the Christchurch Mosque attack in which a lone gunman, armed with several semi-automatic weapons, engaged in the senseless murder of a number of innocent people.

Naturally, the nation was outraged by this attrocity and the government seized on this state of anger to pass a firearms ban that would not have been likely to succeed at any other time. Call me a cynic but most governments take every opportunity to leverage tragedies or disasters to push their own agendas and ideologies further than might otherwise be possible.

In the months that followed, all the semi-automatic rifles in the country were rounded up and destroyed... or so we're told.

Perhaps a better description might be that "all the legally held semi-automatic rifles in the country were rounded up and destroyed".

This move was supposed to make us all safer by ensuring that a mass-murder of the type that took place in Christchurch, would never happen again.

At last, the bad actors and terrorists would no longer have access to the type of weapon that allowed such indiscriminate killing on such a scale.

Cue Tui's ad.

I think the problem we face is that our politicians are so stupid that they don't even realise the scale of their stupidty.

There is no more simplistic and ineffective solution to a problem than to ban something.

Bans are the strategy of those who are totally lacking in the intelligence necessary to devise any other way to control something. In short, a ban is a very blunt and ultimately ineffective tool.

How ineffective?

Well one only has to look at the news reports of late.

Firearms violence seems to have reached an all-time high with almost daily reports of shootings and armed confrontations between gangs and the use of such weapons in other crimes.

Almost every time there's a raid on a gang property or in relation to drugs, a significant cache of guns is collected -- many of them being the evil and banned semi-automatic type that, we were told, would be removed from the equation.

What's more, things appear to be worsening quite quickly of late.

This morning I read this story in the NZH which shows what appears to be a semi-automatic pistol being presented during a school-yard confrontation at a South Auckland high school.

I certainly hope that was simply an airsoft or other replica firearm but I would not be surprised to learn otherwise.

Why are we at the point where guns have proliferated so quickly through certain sectors of our society; where a school-kid thinks it acceptable to use the threat of firearms violence against their peers?

This isn't a firearms problem -- it's a behavioural one.

Simply banning guns is like putting a bandaid on a broken leg. It might give the impression that something is being done but ultimately it is decidedly ineffective.

I fear that this is the start of a rather steep spiral into disaster.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the next step will be the arming of all our police. Instead of a can of pepper spray or a taser, we'll see our PCs wandering about with Glocks strapped to their hips -- so as to protect them from all those semi-automatic guns that were supposed to disappear as if by magic after the ban.

And of course, once the police are routinely armed, the bad actors will be even more inclined to carry guns of their own.

Is this *really* what we want for this country?

Who remembers the good old days when bobbies walked the beat with their pith helmets and nothing more scary than cheery greeting at their disposal?

My, how our society has evolved... NOT!

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