So Unfair!

[peterfitz]

For fuck's sake, gun owners are such goddam babies.... "Boo-hoo, the nasty government wants to make me get a licence for my air rifle that is as powerful as a .22 firearm, they're so unfair, they're not the boss of me, I hate them and wish I'd never been born!" [runs sobbing to bedroom to cry and write bad poetry full of angst and heartbreak

Comments

[basal_surge]

Yeah, I'm a moderately gun nut type, and I've been at a loss to understand why they haven't required a licence for various of the high powered air guns since the eighties (as a fifteen yearold in the eighties with a pump driven .22 airgun that could put a steel bb through both sides of a kerosene can at thirty yards, even I could see why it should be licenced. And it was next door to _silent_. It's a combination between legislator incompetence/ignorance and lobbyist interest groups skewing things.

Mind you, they get all up in arms over two deaths by air gun, and swiftly pass legislation for it, but they can't get support for shifting driving blood alcohol limits down from .8 to .5, which would save, what, fifty or sixty or seventy peoples lives a year?

[basal_surge]

Ballpark estimate after listening to friends who do the science for policy wonks in that area ranting?

http://www.transport.govt.nz/saferjourneys/towardsasafesystem/saferoaduse/

Going on the stats in that doc, Australia has a .05 limit, and have around 22 deaths per million population/year, we have a .08 limit, and have around 28 deaths per million population/year, so what, assuming all other variables are similar (which they won't be, usually, but hey, this is scribbling on envelopes on LJ), then reducing our limit to .05 on a population of 4.5 million might save around 27 to 30 ish dead kiwis a year, which is less than my out of my arse figure based on remembered rantings of road stats scientists, but close enough to make me annoyed that they railroad through firearms legislation on two deaths, but quibble on alcohol legislation on twenty or thirty deaths.

[morbid_curious]

What I find most daft is when they gave up licensing the individual firearms and decided to just license firearm owners instead.

[basal_surge]

That's because they didn't have the funding or the hardware to convert the appallingly inaccurate old firearms registry system to a digital system, and they realised that all their data was garbage anyway, so they didn't actually know what guns were in the country and who had them, even with the old firearms registration. A case of govt just not interested in spending the money to solve the problem, as the registration is definitely workable with today's technology, just nobody in the mid eighties/nineties was willing to pay for the man hours to put together a system.

[morbid_curious]

Yup, have had that discussion with Blue Meanie in the past. Of course, I can't help but compare it with the INCIS debacle where they happily overspent on one of the less useful systems available to them. Government decision making is a very strange beast at times.

[morbid_curious]

That because it involves people who are elected. Elections do not help. Ever. Unfortunately, better systems are also even more difficult to come by.

2004 ford ranger transmission number 182

[anonymous]

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