BELLEVUE, WA – A new report from New Zealand three months after the Parliament there hastily enacted new gun control regulations shows that people are not surrendering their banned firearms, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today that there is a lesson in that for Democrats now vying for the presidency.
“From poll leader Joe Biden down to last place Washington Gov. Jay Inslee,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “every Democrat running has offered some new degree of gun control to include bans on many semiautomatic firearms. But New Zealanders, who don’t even enjoy a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in their constitution, are balking at the notion of turning in their firearms.
“Here in the United States,” he continued, “where we have the Second Amendment as the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, anybody who seriously believes the citizens will line up to just hand over their guns may be too delusional to be president.”
According to Reason magazine, only about 700 firearms have so far been surrendered, out of an estimated 1.5 million guns in the country.
“When a government starts penalizing law-abiding citizens for crimes they didn’t commit,” Gottlieb observed, “it’s up to those citizens to resist. We understand there are legal challenges in the works, and we support that.
“After the tragedy of Christchurch, our sympathies are still with the people of New Zealand,” he added. “However, it should be no surprise that there are now concerns about a possible black market in illicit firearms.
“Remember,” Gottlieb recalled, “the man now accused of this horrible crime apparently did it in part to stir up a gun control debate and bring about new restrictions in New Zealand and in the United States. Ardern and the Parliament gave him exactly what he wanted.
“If this is what’s happening in New Zealand,” he concluded, “just what do Democrats running for president think would happen here if they followed the same course? We guarantee they would collide head-on with the Bill of Rights.”
With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.