I still run into people who ask me why I/we moved to New Zealand.

This headline and story from today’s New York Times provides a clue …

Sales of Guns Soar in US as Nation Weighs Tougher Limits

Read about this lunacy if you want to get seriously depressed. And pray it never happens here.

The story tells of people feverishly buying out the inventory of gun stores — especially assault weapons and high-capacity ammo magazines — because they fear new limits from the Obama Administration. Of course, whatever Obama proposes will be substantially watered down by Congress (if anything passes at all), even after the Newtown school massacre, since Congress has pissed its pants at threats from the pro-gun lobby for decades.

Believe it or not, the response to the Newtown massacre of the National Rifle Association (NRA), America’s leading and infamously strong gun lobby group, was to recommend that each school in America have stationed in it “a good man with a gun”.

The NY Times story tells of one fellow who just sold for $1700 an assault rifle that before the school shooting was worth $500. He said: “I don’t think I did anything wrong. I wanted to get my teeth done, get a computer and pay for my first year of Bible college.”

Get the picture? Now there’s a next door neighbor I’m sure you’d like to have!

“If I had 1,000 AR15s I could sell them in a week,” said one gun dealer in Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines, with about 200,000 people, is a just bit more populated than Hawke’s Bay. Imagine what fun we’d have with 1,000 assault rifles, and more each week, on the prowl in Hawke’s Bay.

By US standards, our ‘pitched battles’ here in Hawke’s Bay over dams, hockey turfs, fluoride and amalgamation are rather tame affairs … thankfully.

Tom Belford

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