NZ Politics

I get where you're coming from. I live rurally, and while I don't have a gun myself, every one of my neighbours do. They're good people, and I'm not interested in waging a war on guns or anything. They're a necessary tool out here, for a bunch of reasons.

And I don't expect you guys will be happy about it. It sounds like a pain in the arse.

But I'll go back to the example of cars that the spokesman brought up. I'm not happy that I have to register my car. It's expensive and a pain in the arse. The vast majority of us registered drivers are good people, who don't at all represent the minority that endanger or hurt others. Besides, an awful lot of the worst behaviour is by people who've stolen the car or don't have a licence or registration.

But my car is something that can easily hurt or kill someone if I'm even slightly careless with it. I know I won't be, but I know others will be. And there will be many drivers, licensed or not, who deliberately commit crimes with cars. So we need some way to have accountability where we can, and the licence and registration system greatly improves that. The stolen cars, etc. make it an imperfect system that often fails to catch criminals, but it's a lot better than nothing. So it's a price I'm willing to pay to operate a lethal machine.

If you change cars to guns, it has the exact same logic. But guns are far more commonly used to commit very serious crimes than cars, despite being far less prevalent. So the incentive to have a system to track ownership is far greater.

If there weren't monsters like the mosque shooter - who was a registered gun owner - or criminals, we wouldn't need shit like this. But there are, so we do. There are so many rules in society that only exist because a small minority of people are arseholes. Car registration and gun registration are just those kinds of things. Especially because they can kill very easily. That's why I support the registration of both.

Edit to everyone else reading this thread: I'd love it if people didn't downvote comments just because you disagree with them. @[email protected]'s comment, for example, is a reasonable and thoughful response. I think it's good to hear the other side and we should support them sharing their views here.