• New Zealand Gun Law Reformation Passes First Reading, 119 to 1
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https://twitter.com/KommandoBlog/status/1114048504450768903 Oh look, the confiscation of firear- crossbows and airguns, has begun. And this is because of someones political views who has not voted.
I mean, I most likely am not as personally concerned by this as you are, for obvious reasons. I think things like feature-based bans are dumb and would rather politicians on evidence-based policies instead. However, I don't consider such legislation to be some extreme violation of human rights like some here present it as, and I don't subscribe to the very categorical stances that seem to be more common as of late regarding gun control being useless or proliferation having no impact whatsoever on lethality or suicide rates. Is that being complacent? I'm not militant by any stretch, but I'm not rooting for gun owners to be persecuted either.
Not really if that’s the case. By complacent I mean more the people who refuse to even acknowledge that mass weapon confiscations are a form of retroactive punishment which negatively affects against gun owners, or are completely fine with it because it doesn’t affect them. It’s May not be considered a human right, but I would still argue it could possibly be a violation of civil liberties/due process because of the nature of ex post facto laws. Either way I don’t think it’s fair or justified. Everything about their governments response looks extremely poorly thought out. They (thankfully) don’t even have any real plans on how to carry out their confiscations.
From a legal standpoint, those laws aren't ex post facto. Retroactive punishment means to make someone legally liable for actions they had made before the new law was introduced and which were legal at the time. But you'll never see a gun owner being prosecuted for having possessed a firearm prior to new gun laws that forbids it. What they can be prosecuted for is still holding onto them after the law is passed and the grace period ended, which is breaking the law then, not before. Retroactive punishment is pretty much forbidden in most modern legal frameworks. You can argue that they're being financially punished for having to give away/sell at a loss an object they wouldn't have acquired had they known of the law in advance. But that phenomenon is not at all exclusive to gun laws. Take air pollution laws for example: vehicles that emit over a certain quantity of fine particles are forbidden from entering some cities, including vehicles that were built before air pollution laws even existed. Someone who bought an old car prior to the law and who lives in one of the aforementioned cities pretty much has to sell his car now, maybe even at a loss since its price may have dropped as a result of those regulations. This sucks for him, but it's pretty much necessary to avoid deaths due to pollution in particularly congested cities. Pretty much any law consists in making something that used to be legal illegal, and in most cases (and pretty much all of regulatory law) this requires some investment on the part of private entities to continue operating legally. So I don't agree that this type of regulation is a violation of due process or civil liberties, and it's pretty much necessary for progress in most cases. So the problem with feature bans is not really the fact that something that was legal to own or use no longer is (that's what most laws do) but that they're implemented despite having been proved to have little effect.
I just want to comment on the whole financially punished/retroactive punishment thing. I believe it's excessively overbearing of a government to force its citizens under threat of force (police, jail time, etc.) to surrender items that were at one point legal and most importantly that those citizens has never used in an illegal manner. If a gun owner is an upstanding citizen and owns a semi-automatic firearm there's no good logical reason to take that firearm away from them outside of knee jerk politicking. The dude with the car isn't going to risk jail time or a police raid over not selling his car in violation of an emissions law and is likely to still drive it around as if the law wasn't passed anyways. If car dude gets caught breaking the law he gets a fine. Furthermore that emissions law serves a public good for everyone meanwhile banning AR15s does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying issues with the system that let a mass shooter get his hands on one. I just don't like watching people's posessions get taken from them because a government is too complacent to come up with real solutions to the true issue.
Emission laws only net you a fine (for now) but there are plenty of car regulations that your vehicle can get impounded for if you don't abide by them. I'd also advise against ignoring emission laws cause the fines stack rather quickly and you'll find yourself having to pay more than if you were to buy a less polluting car anyway. Ignoring the fact that people do sometimes go to jail for failing to follow regulatory law, I don't see what's so special about "taking people's possession under threat of force" as long as it's properly justified. That's what taxation is, after all. So sure, AWBs aren't properly justified, since they demonstrably have little impact on violent use of firearms. But I don't think it's as easy to broaden that claim to any and all gun control laws that may require guns being taken out of circulation in some capacity.
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