New Zealand to Ban all Military Style Semi Automatic Weapons Immediately

Good for NZ.

They managed to denounce white supremacy, support immigrants, and eliminate unnecessary assault rifles after ONE incident.

 

PM Ardern has certainly risen to the occasion...

 

Occasionally the gifted have to make decisions to assist the less fortunate -- I firmly believe that New Zealand will continue to thrive as a nation after this tough unilateral decision.

 

Well that’s how the narrative started. However, history would be different without the French also fighting the British and arming/training US revolutionaries.

 

“Entire population” — what percentage of NZers do you think want these weapons to be available to the public?

 

fair enough. "that's what authoritarianism looks like. Unilateral imposition of a value on a minority." yeah, that's even better.

 

Are there any New Zealanders claiming this shooting was just a false flag operation staged by the government so that they could take away all of their guns and start setting up concentration camps behind Walmarts? Or is that just what we do here after every mass shooting?

 

I guess Constitutional protections don't matter much to some people.

here, you guys will like this. probably deserves its own thread

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/democrat-opposition-constitutional-order-electoral-college/

 

What do you mean by “value” here?

It appears that democracy = authoritarianism by your logic.

 

okay, I guess the "value" embodied by this kind of unilateral, top-down governmental action is a risk-averse, pure precautionary principle desire to protect against some kind of risk (here the perceived risk of being killed in a mass shooting by a particular firearm). The opposite value I suppose would be a valuing of personal freedom and/or liberty, which in the United States manifests itself in an acknowledgement of a fundamental human right to self-defense which further manifests itself as a natural political right to bear arms.

In my book the value of freedom trumps or overrides the more speculative and remote constraint on freedom born of a desire to reduce "harm."

 

My M&P 9C is great for home defense and personal defense with my LTC. My AR is for fun and I wouldn’t lose much much sleep if it was banned.

 

Perception is everything. Some folks believe updating an electoral system based on 18th century agrarian demographics and geography.... some folks prefer keeping things the same over all this time.

Considering how much the US has urbanized over the last hundred years... updating things seems prudent.

 

Pretty sure New Zealand has a democracy and a constitution of its own that were duly respected. They don't have a right to bear arms there like we have in the Second Amendment here, so they have more latitude to regulate the guns. That's not authoritarianism.

Speaking ideologically, yes I think this is the theoretical justification both for the founding fathers and oftentimes from champions today. That the right to bear arms provides the 'price signal' (to think in economic terms) back to government agents that what they do is acceptable or not. If you take away the guns, you take away the people's power to object, and there is no feedback to assure the discipline of the government. Makes some sense theoretically, but we don't see it in practice, suggesting there is something wrong with the theory. We have strong gun control countries that nevertheless have stable, responsible, and untyrannical governments. We have weak gun control countries that are dictatorships. We have examples of countries in which the people take up arms to overthrow their tyrannical dictatorships and it devolves into a grisly cluster**** that is even more tyrannical than what they started with(e.g. Syria) or else so chaotic that they end up being oppressed by some faction of their own resistance (e.g. Libya). So I don't really see that it delivers on its promises in ensuring anyone's freedoms.

 

Instead of simply protecting the political say of people that live in rural areas or away from large urban areas, instead the electoral college gives too much power to those. For example, California gets 55 electoral votes for 37.3 million people (2010 Census), or one electoral vote for approximately each 680,000 people. Wyoming receives 3 votes for its 568,000 people, or about one per 190,000. So the people in Wyoming almost three times the voting power than the people in California.

So you are correct... doing away with the Electoral College isn't needed as much as a rebalancing of the electoral votes.

 

Long overdue.
There were attempts for decades to regulate guns but they were twarthed again and again by NRA like organisations.
Where are these gun crazy organisations now?
They should take their part of the blame.


Australia has been on intense pressure to relax their gun laws as well even though after 1996 with the buy back of automatic weapons both suicides and mass shooting went down.
I hope austrlian politicians and the public had a wake up call after this and not give in to the gun lobby.

 

Maybe we need a new electoral college thread. It's not my understanding, however, that agrarian demographics had anything to do with the establishment of the electoral college. The EC exists because the early USA was a confederation of sovereign states and they wanted to balance the amount of say each state had in the federal system -- letting large states have more say, somewhat proportional to their size, but not allowing the tiny states' interests to become completely swamped.

I'm still a fan of states' rights and the EC. I don't want to use states' rights as a rationalization of the abrogation of people's federally-guaranteed civil rights, and I don't want to keep the EC to deliver another Trump victory. But, I'm not going to support permanent solutions to temporary problems either.

 

In the 18th/19th century they wouldn’t have considered it agrarian demographics but just how things are.

You’re right about how/why the electoral college was setup but the gap between the smallest states and largest states has increased significantly. From my 21st perspective, it seems the electoral college is based on agrarian demographics because we have urbanized so much.

Texas is one of the most urbanized states now based off how the government determines density.

 

you can't defend yourself from a drone strike and tanks with a decked out AR-15.

You are sheep in a pen so get used to it.

 

The “right to bear arms” doesn’t imply right to possess and use, in self defense, any weapon of one’s choosing. You can believe in the principle of right to self defense with a deadly weapon while also supporting practical limits on those weapons for the sake of public safety.

 

fair enough. but arguably an AR-platform rifle is closer to a single-shot musket than to a tank, bazooka, or drone aircraft.