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Our greetings to New Zealand – Thoughts from our staff editor:

Recently, in the wake of the news regarding the abysmal failure (https://bit.ly/2pfTFqD) of Jacynda « Jackboot » Ardern’s mandatory buyback of modern sporting, hunting, and defensive rifles, carbines and shotguns – planned for years by the local leftists and implemented on the emotional wave of the Christchurch shooting on suggestion by Australia’s former Prime Minister and master gun grabber John Howard (https://bit.ly/2pdNLpY) – we have experienced a resurgence of angry comments by supporters of the new gun control measures from New Zealand.

Unlike back in the day when we first wrote about it, they’re only a handful. But they’re angry, almost ravenous, at the abysmal failure of their gun grabbing dream.

In this post, we will try to address some of their points. And before we start, no, we won’t explain why you « need » or « don’t need » certain types of firearms: we are sick and tired to try and explain to a wave of self-entitled, contemptuous teenagers (ring any bells?) why nobody, much less politicians or a government, should decide what somebody else needs or doesn’t need.

• POINT 1 •
« In this Country, we don’t have the right to own firearms »

Yes, you do. It’s an inherent human right. The fact that most governments worldwide do not recognize it as such does not make it any less of a right; it makes it a DENIED right, just like Saudi women have the right to vote, to drive, to leave their homes without a male escort. They’re just DENIED that right.

To understand this concept, you people need to look no further than to the Constitution of the United States of America.

And before you start – a disclaimer:  Firearms United Network has no ties with any organization in the US. They’re prohibited by statute to act outside of their national boundaries. The closest we go is to Canada.
We just happen to have a few people with a solid University background in our pool. People who spent their time in locked, stinky rooms with their faces buried in books rather than drinking beer and smoking pot at parties or waving signs on the streets.

The Constitution of the United States was written by a handful of intellectuals who were followers of the Enlightenment movement. As such, they were just as much « civilized Europeans » as any one could be back in the day.

In the very incipit of that Constitution, they enshrined one principle: that rights are superior to any form of government or will of the People or the representatives thereof, and thus that rights exist regardless of what a government, politicians, the « State » at large, or even the People itself think about them. This also means that the People as a whole can not give up a right: an individual may decide freely not to exercise a right, but that does not mean that said individual is stripped of said right, and does not make said individual, or the community as a whole, entitled to decide what kind of rights others should be allowed to exercise.

The concept of « God-given rights », in the U.S. Constitution, means just that. The Founding Fathers of the United States were followers of the Enlightenment, most of them were free masons and atheists and did not believe in a « God » per se; they stated that the People’s rights were given to them by their Creator because it was the only way, in the general cultural environment of the late 1700s, to make it clear even to the man of the street (or, in this case, the pioneer building a log cabin in the Appalachians) that rights were not a generous concession by a sovereign entity – be it a monarch, a President, or a Parliament – but that they transcended any form of State and government, and that if a government did not recognize said rights or allowed the People to exercise them, then the government was wrong.

The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was never, EVER meant to allow the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies to own the means to hunt or defend themselves against aggressive animals, bandits, natives, or the British. It was meant to allow the People of the United States to own the necessary tools to counterbalance the firepower that would be in the hand of the people serving the government (military and law enforcement), because if the government even decided to go full authoritarian, it would mobilize the military and law enforcement to go after the People’s rights, and the People would need to have the tools handy to mount a resistance and a revolution.

Leftists who live in the myth of the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban revolution, of all the « revolutionary movements » in south America and Africa, and of the resistance movements against the nazis in Europe, take note: the Constitution of the United States allowed the People to own the tools to mount a resistance and start a revolution before it was made cool by some Argentinean dentist whose face would be printed on T-shirts sewn by child slave workers in the South-East Asia and sold for profit worldwide by multinational corporations so that you could live your delusion.

The Constitution of the United States was also the first to truly realize that rights are universal and transcend any form of government, or even the will of the People of its elected representatives.

Which brings us straight to…

• POINT 2 •
« The vast majority of citizens in New Zealand doesn’t feel the need for such guns and supports those politics »

The vast majority of Germans and Italians supported nazism and fascism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
The vast majority of Russians supported communism all the way through the early 1990s. The vast majority of Cubans still do.
The vast majority of white South Africans supported Apartheid.
The vast majority of Americans, at least in the very early 1920s, supported the Prohibition, just like they had supported Jim Crow Laws, and later on supported the war in Iraq.
The vast majority of Arabs support restrictive politics on women.
The vast majority of Spaniards and Portuguese, at least early on, supported the Franco and Salazar/Caetano dictatorships; the vast majority of Chileans, at least at the very onset, supported the Pinochet coup; so did the vast majority of Greeks with the Colonels’ Junta; so did the Iraqis with Saddam.

Need we go on? No, of course not. You guys got the point: the simple fact that the majority of a population supports something does not automatically make that thing right.

At the very core of the concept of modern liberal democracy (and of course by « liberal » we mean based on the concept of classic liberalism, ie. the type of democracies we’re used to see in most of Europe and in the vast majority of former British Empire Countries and European colonies) is that the smallest minority can raise its voice, expect it to be heard, and if possible override the will of the majority. Even if that small minority is composed by a single individual.

Because in a modern liberal democracy, minorities are protected. And particularly a mantra out of protecting minorities has been made: ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gender minorities. Their rights shall be ensured, sometimes even going to extremes (there are indeed some fringe groups even asking to « stop pedo bashing », would you believe that?).

We all agree on that: protect the liberties and the rights of the minority groups.

And yet, gun owners (which ARE a minority mostly everywhere!) seem to be oddly fair game. The last minority left in the world that’s still politically correct to bash.

The attacks against the rights of minorities come from all directions. How many times have we heard that not all muslims, not all people of African descent, should be blamed for, judged for and collectively punished by the crimes of a fringe group or isolated individuals?

And yet, gun owners are. Every. Single. Time.

When a law banning guns, or restricting their legal availability, is passed following one, two, even a handful of tragic events which do not include the totality of legal gun owners but only a few isolated individuals or even people who obtain and use guns illegally or fraudulently… that’s collective punishment.

Oh, by the way: collective punishment is severely prohibited by all sorts of international law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Just to name a handful.

By stating that the « will of the majority » is to disarm a group of law-abiding gun owners, you refuse the idea that rights are something that nobody can take from nobody else. You instead accept the idea that the government – be it for a whim or following the will of a « majority » – can strip a minority of a right that it shouldn’t be allowed to legislate upon in the first place, not now, nor ever.

In other words, you’re validating the idea according to which democracy is nothing but mob rule.

Now, now, follow closely because here comes the magic trick of the day.

Guess who said that « democracy is mob rule », lately?

Yup: THE CHRISTCHURCH SHOOTER. Exactly in the penultimate line of page 27 of his manifesto.

You are essentially proving a loathsome, hateful individual who massacred fifty-one innocents in cold blood right. You might as well vouch some pages from the ‘Mein Kampf’, while you’re at it.

But this is not the magic trick of the day. Here it comes…

On March 20th, 2019, the Office of the Film and Literature Classification of New Zealand (a.k.a. the Censors) classified the terrorist manifesto as « objectionable » and banned its ownership, distribution, and even knowledge of its contents within New Zealand (https://bit.ly/2nLdjtY).

Now, being the Firearms United Network based in Europe, we have not broken any rule as it does not apply to us: freedom of information would protect us from any kind of prosecution that New Zealand could try against us here, as it would violate our constitutional rights of freedom of information and freedom of speech, and any attempt by the New Zealand government to have us prosecuted here in Europe for that would spark an international freedom of information case that would not end well for the New Zealand government.

BUT (and here is the magic trick of the day), for you anti-gunners from New Zealand… reading the few lines above…

JUST MADE YOU CRIMINALS.

Yup: by giving you the information about the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto line in which he wrote that « Democracy is mob rule », WE JUST TURNED YOU INTO CRIMINALS. You could be prosecuted and punished under the laws of New Zealand.

Does it seem fair to you? No, of course it isn’t. We stabbed you in the back.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO BY VOUCHING FOR A GOVERNMENT’S ARBITRARY DECISION TO EXPLOIT A TRAGEDY TO TURN TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YOUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN INTO CRIMINALS OVERNIGHT BY THE STROKE OF A PEN, punishing them collectively with mandatory forfeiture of property and threatening them with jail time for the crimes of a terrorist with multiple criminal charges in his home Country of Australia who duped the New Zealand authorities thanks to the fact that the Australian and New Zealand Police databases aren’t connected despite the almost-free flow of people among the two Countries.

By supporting gun control, ANY gun control, following the Christchurch shooting, you are stabbing in the back people who had nothing to do with that act of violence, or any other act of violence for that matter, and that in some cases even helped rescue the survivors and dig the graves for the victims of the massacre.

Now, if you believe that you’re still in the right by acting that way, and that this is for the « common good », you might as well turn yourselves in to the New Zealand Police, because by knowing what the shooter wrote at the bottom of page 27 of his manifesto, you’re now all criminals.

On the other hand, if you do not believe that we had any right to turn you all into criminals, and that you shouldn’t be punished for that… well, congratulations. You just found some common grounds with us. Now it’s time you think, and deeply so, about your positions on the gun ban.

And when you do, drop us a line.

ACT TOGETHER, FEEL FREE AND MAKE CHANGES