New Zealand town with too many jobs offering packages of land and homes for $165k

Well, it's because I like guns. Firearms are an amazing hobby. It teaches responsibility, maintenance of a fragile and precision machine, puts you in control of your personal safety, and can put dinner on your plate if you're ever up for a bit of hunting. I subscribe to a very Locke-esq philosophy of life. Where some group begins by regulating one freedom I enjoy, they will not simply stop. All governments will slowly etch away at freedoms that people have in the aim of securing more control over it's citizens (furthering the divide between the peasants and the ruling class). Firearms rights are a very good litmus test for my case since it quickly points to, in my opinion, if the population has given up their own rights to protect themselves and is ready to pack up their freedoms and hand them over to their ruling class.

In my personal opinion, an unarmed populous is a completely ruled populous since the people have given up all hope of being in control of their own safety and government's actions. They do this not even for safety but for the illusion of such.

I'd like to reverse the question to you. Rather then as "Why is that a problem instead of a perk" in relation to owning firearms, let me ask this about banning fire arms.

The facts simply don't align with the assessment that banning fire arms will positively effect anyone. Firearms ownership simply does not correlate to crime.

I'll agree that it does correlate with firearm related deaths since that is plainly evident in the data but those deaths are replaced with other means when firearms are taken out of the equation.

There are very few recent studies about this on a federal level. This is largely due to the CDC being prohibited from researching firearms related topics.

The 'best' source I have found was a source from '07. [0]

An "ok" secondary "check" for this, that is by all accounts not a very good measure, is by looking at some charts wikipedia has made [1] [2]. If you go to those two pages you will see that the places with the most fire arms are seldom the most dangerous places. Now, if you change your comparison from Guns vs Intentional Homicide to % People Living Below Poverty Line vs Intentional Homicides you will see something interesting [3]. Once you have >10-20% of the people living below poverty there is a huge increase in homicides. I think if this is studied further that you will find that firearms are a single means to some crimes, not the only mean and that crime correlates to poverty, not firearms ownership.

Personally, I don't want my rights to be taken away "just because;" I want a reason for rights being revoked. The plain fact of the matter is that there does not seem to be any reason to revoke the right of firearms ownership.

[0] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235214... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...

That makes no sense. I don't understand this comparison.

I'm saying this because if I am going to move some place there needs to be a beneficial trade in outside factors that will make my life better. Moving to some place that will restrict me more will make my life worse. Therefor I will not move to such a place.

Even given this, I can still acknowledge things I would like to have in my living situation (cheap homes and land).

I don't see what you object to here.

> BTW, your link literally starts with: "About 230,000 licensed firearms owners own and use New Zealand's estimated 1.1 million firearms." That's supposed to be "nonsensical"?

It's not the amount of firearms that are important to me, it's the type.

Quantity != quality.

If there was a place with no firearms regulations and 0 firearms owned by the public, I'd not mind moving there! I'd buy the guns I want since there are no regulations.

The volume of guns owned isn't important at all. It's important instead to have freedom to buy guns I want to own with features that please me.

Auckland is in New Zealand.

> The land is cheap

Sure, in the wops. Anywhere near a city is very expensive. I'd say on average land and housing (building materials especially) is far cheaper in the US.

> That makes no sense to me.

I think this is the crux of the issue. If they attack me, I agree physically defending myself is obviously an option.

But why instigate violence against someone who isn't assaulting, or attempting to assault you?

Why not call and wait for the police, or follow them as they escape whilst on the phone to police, rather than physically putting your life and safety at risk? For what? Objects and possessions of economic value?

> Really, what does NZ do that is horribly different from the US (beside telecom monopolies being worse and everything being far more expensive over in the land down under ;))?

We had telco monopolies.. In the 90's. The government broke them up. We have fibre in 30% of our main city centres and we're aiming for 80% of NZ households by 2022.

Mobile data, calling and SMS is very cheap in comparison to the US. We aren't locked into contracts like you are. In fact, all major telcos offer far cheaper prepaid plans in comparison plans to any US carrier I've seen.

Our internet is on average better than the US except in parts of Silicon Valley, where Google fibre rollouts are already in place and some major city centres. However that's changing very rapidly with fibre rollouts and 4G mobile data plans lowering each quarter.

Then I could go on about our excellent healthcare, welfare and social systems, the fact this is the easiest country in the world to start a business and support yourself/family due to small-business friendly laws and economic concessions..

Maybe I've been drinking too much of the American left-wing kool-aid, but in a country where children die because parents don't have health insurance, mass-shootings happen several times a year, and homelessness is a massive problem.. I just don't believe your people are more "free".

> That is a horrible analogy. Owning a firearm is nothing like brain surgery and you can 'practice' law without having a law degree (I am using practice loosely here).

> You don't really need years of training to handle a firearm, you just need a little bit of practice and some good supervision. Nothing special. It's what you'd find any any decent firearms range.

.. It might just be me, but I think operating a weapon or machine that has the ability to maim, kill and disable other people should require a significant amount of time invested and reviewed before they're able to do so on their own.

Licensing makes sense. It does for cars, it does for trucks, it does for heavy machinery. All of these things have one thing in common. You could potentially hurt other people very easily, if you're not trained. However I don't see us coming to any sort of agreement on this given the length, detail and tone of your response.

We're not taking away, we're simply saying prove that you're not going to be an idiot.

Also I think you're confusing New Zealand with Australia for all of your points. Their internet sucks, their political climate is far more right.

You're right about things being expensive here, but maybe it's something to do with the things that matter being free (housing, healthcare) that makes New Zealand one of the happiest places to live in the world? And probably the happiest place to live that doesn't have oil money.