Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Digital persuasion and the…, in reply to ,
people would have looked at Public Address system to see what you had written here. I did. Accurately, I still do:-)
I saw it in a tweet.
And yet, it’s wrapped into our lives. It’s a way I can tell people when I’ve written something like the above, it’s my connection to decades’ worth of friends, it’s how everyone gets everyone else to come to their damn gigs
Yes, it was a very fast way to organize a group of people when I was doing stuff for Uber drivers. But it was also not a very good way of organizing them for that purpose, considering the pages were perused by Uber staff and the police at will. It's very existence stifled all attempts to build anything else. It gave a rapid sense of engagement, without any commitment to real engagement. It enabled people to feel that they were a part of something whilst being actually powerless and ineffective and unheard, and spied upon by their oppressors and the authorities.
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The whole point of the article is to look at current law, the proposed reforms and make it clear and workable to keep guns out of the hands of the
“mentally unwell” and “lone gunman”.
I think the point is actually much stricter than that, it’s to keep them out of the hands of everyone who does not have a legitimate need for them. Which will, incidentally, help with those two specific problem groups as well. But I think you miss the mark if you think that the general will in NZ is only about those two groups. It’s also against recreational use of such dangerous toys, in light of how few of the “mentally unwell” and “lone gunman” flags went off prior to this massacre. There is no accepted right to own until proven unworthy for them anymore. The burden of proof has shifted to “yes you can have one if you have a genuine reason to possess it”, and the genuine reasons that are acceptable have got a whole lot fewer.
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While I get that shoddy legislation is typically a PITA in the long run, I'd like to hear from those alarmed about it what actual bad outcomes they can foresee? Contextualized against the obviously very, very bad outcome that our current laws enabled.
I can see only three possible bad outcomes, really.
1. That the legislation doesn't go far enough and inappropriate firearms will still get through.
2. That the legislation will go too far and firearms that people have a perfectly valid reason to own will be taken away.
3. That people will accidentally fall foul of unclear laws and be treated as criminals.Of these, only 1 really has me worried. Because the reasons put forward for 2 are in general very weak, there are only a very small number of valid reasons to own firearms for work purposes (pest control and the police and army - any others?) - almost all of the rest are recreational, and I really struggle to see why weapons more appropriate for hunting/sport than for ending human life on a massive scale are not enough for the purposes of recreation. And 3 strikes me as very much overblown. Anyone wanting to be sure should avail themselves of an amnesty period to find out. Everyone else is literally risking this willfully and would have only themselves to blame.
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Hard News: Splore 2019 – Please Don't…, in reply to ,
True, I wonder what all those hippies are doing now?
Probably hard to generalize, other than they are all certainly very much older than they used to be.
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Legal Beagle: A (non-)submission on the…, in reply to Robert Singers,
Control of any item is not invalidated because there is still some hole not closed. That's just not how controlling things works, that you give up because it's not 100% perfect. Yes, people can still fabricate guns. But that will cut their numbers down to a tiny fraction of what will be available when you can just walk into a shop and buy them. People can still murder by other means, but that's not an argument to leave one particularly effective method completely open. Public policy is always a numbers game and drastically reducing the number of weapons whose essential purpose is ending human life goes a long way to drastically reducing the chances of a repeat incident of the Christchurch massacre.
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Hard News: Splore 2019 – Please Don't…, in reply to Nick Russell,
Why wouldn’t they?
It is possible, occasionally, as with guns, for bipartisan action in the common good to happen. I still like to think National is capable of it, but their current leadership is showing no aptitude, except in the face of something that is a complete no-brainer like gun control after a massacre. That it's also Paula Bennett, who dropped the ball so fucking badly on guns on her own watch, gives me even less hope.
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Legal Beagle: A (non-)submission on the…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I think that is meant to be the point - no one is, so why are they calling for it for guns, which only slaughtered a proportionally quite small number of people recently?
It's an equivocation with things that are really very different. There are entirely different balances of harms and utilities between these goods so as to make the analogy break down. It can be stretched, and it can go on and on, so I don't see much point in playing with it. These guns are going to be banned, because NZ society by a huge majority finds ownership of them to be repugnant. The question here is really about the details about how such laws should be drafted.
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Doesn't seem short sighted to me, it's focusing on the the 99.999% of guns ever obtained. But yes, ammo is also being prohibited.
The experience of the last few centuries has shown us that prohibition rarely removes the prohibited goods from circulation it just creates a black market.
I call bullshit on that. They did exactly this in Australia and it worked well. Because the "goods" are not an addictive drug for which there is a enormous market, they are mostly things purchased by law abiding citizens who still have plenty of pop-a-cap options open to them, and no intention of mass slaughter. Huge numbers of these guns will be handed back, the shelves of gun shops will not be full of them, and killers like the nameless Christchurch bastard will find it much, much harder to fill their boot with them.
Legally purchasing a weapon offers an opportunity to inspect who has a weapon.
It will still be legal to purchase weapons. Just not those weapons. Everyone who has one of those will soon be face the very serious question of whether they want the risk of facing charges for their plaything. If they are a criminal, they will most likely find themselves facing much more serious charges if such a weapon is found in the proximity of some criminal enterprise. It's bad enough to be found with a gun of any kind, much more so a gun that is strictly prohibited to basically everyone.
And we should keep in mind that the weapon of choice for attacks in Europe has been trucks and vans driven into crowds.
OK, noted. We'll be banning the guns anyway, though, I expect.
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Given what Chloe has said here, the question of the referendum is not really particularly difficult: "Would you like to see the Legalise and Regulate Cannabis Act become law?" or some such wording. The real meat is in the drafting of the Act itself and National are idiots to not want to join in on that. They'll end up with no time to prepare in the Parliamentary debate over the passage of the Act, putting themselves at a disadvantage, risking looking like ignorant fools.
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For anyone considering helping Graeme here, this has already happened, another party (Pete McCaffrey) has submitted the above so that Graeme can make an oral submission without feeling that he has lied in the metadata. The @NZParliament twitter account confirmed also that he would not be blocked from making an oral submission by the existence of the metadata forced into the written submission, so long as he said in the submission that he did actually wish to make a written submission.
I can't comment expertly on the submission itself, not being a lawyer. Seems sound that criminal law changes should be included into the statutes themselves, to prevent criminal overreach by the police, but at this time, I can't say I care that much about the rights of people to hold onto parts of prohibited weapons and ammunition that but recently took 50 NZ lives and injured 50 more people at the hands of one white supremacist.
Certainly this kind of hole should be shored up as fast as it can, preferably at the outset, but my heart would hardly be broken if it was not and attempts to wriggle around the hastily written law by making tiny alterations to equipment I feel has no place in NZ society. I don't expect that it is easy to fully specify what kinds of parts fall within the definition of an attempt at making a weapon capable of this kind of carnage, and there may well be a bunch of borderline cases found in the next few months that Parliament wishes, in hindsight, it had thought of. There might be weapons manufacturers who can tailor their way around these laws easily.