New Zealand Sets an Example of Self-Respect

Just six days after the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, a country where mass shootings are rare, passed a sweeping new ban on semiautomatic rifles and large ammunition magazines.

Meanwhile, in the US, despite a mass shooting every nine months, we cannot even pass a moderate degree of gun control.

Where is our self-respect? Where is our respect for life? Predictably, the NRA wasted no time, as their spokeswoman tweeted, “The US isn’t New Zealand, they do not have an inalienable right to bear arms and to self-defense, we do.” Really? That is the best you can do?

A majority supports some form of gun control

As we pointed out in our February 11 Commentary, when you aggregate polls of Americans across Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, you find that 65% support increased gun control. And yet, a powerful minority of Congress prevents us from finding any reasonable compromise.

The NRA argument

As we noted in our Gun Control Research, the NRA has only 5 million members but spends enough on promoting their interests in Congress to prevent reasonable progress. Their defense of individual ownership of military-style assault rifles, even in the face of the growing frequency of mass shootings, is based on no better logic than “in the US it is an inalienable right” and strikes us as sheer folly. Somehow they believe this argument is dispositive? That it requires no further discussion or compromise? We think otherwise.

The Second Amendment is amendable

The Second Amendment is part of our Constitution. We understand that. But our Constitution has been changed through further amendment 27 times, seven of which have been ratified in the last six decades. When an institution ceases over time to be effective, we modernize. If a law or policy becomes destructive to human life, we change it. We have departments like the FDA, EPA, and FAA to protect us from bad drugs, bad environmental pollution, and bad airplanes. If we endured a major airplane accident every nine months, we are quite sure that even the NRA would demand that the FAA be reformed.  

New Zealand showed us what a people can do when they act in a fact-based and rational manner and find compromise.