I’m sure you heard that the New Zealand gun grab has begun.

Four months after Christchurch shooting, New Zealand gun owners turn over their weapons for money
Dozens of Christchurch gun owners on Saturday handed over their weapons in exchange for money, in the first of more than 250 planned buyback events around New Zealand after the government outlawed many types of semi-automatics.

Interesting. To read the headline, you might think New Zealanders were eagerly swapping their guns for cash. Lessee…

This article guesstimates the number of firearms at 1-1.5 million. I’ll roll with that even though 1.5 million is the low end of other estimates I’ve seen.

Let’s say there are a mere one million guns to be turned in. There will be “more than 250” turn-in events; call it 259.

To get all the guns, they need to average 3861 per event. Oddly enough, while this story gives the number of people turning in guns (169), it doesn’t say how many guns were turned in. But they shelled out around NZ$430,000 ($288,000) to those 169.

NZ$2544/US$1705 per head. The payment is based on firearm age, and never goes more than 95% of market value as I understand it. So let’s say that was two guns per sucker.

338. That is: 8.75% of the average 3861 they need to get all of them.

That’s some compliance rate. And that’s the “best case.” “Worst case” is a mere 4.4%, based on another high end estimate I’ve seen.

Hmm. That could be a million torqued off gun owning voters. Given that 2017 election turn-out was 2.6 million, 2020 elections in New Zealand could be as interesting as in the US.

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]

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