A common—and persuasive—argument against gun registration is that those who comply just put themselves on a list to have their firearms stolen by government officials in the future. As if to emphasize the point, the New Zealand government recently confiscated firearms licenses and the guns they covered from 62 people because of their political ideology. The situation is an important reminder that warnings against registering firearms are correct. But it also raises a red flag about governments’ willingness to punish people for the ideas they believe.
Under the Influence of Ideology
“Sixty-two firearms licence holders with views aligned to the Sovereign Citizens movement had their licences revoked after a police intelligence operation,” Catherine Hubbard reported for the Waikato Times on October 13. “Nationally, police identified 1,400 people as acting under the influence of Sovereign Citizen ideologies, and of that number, 158 were firearms licence holders.”
If you’re not familiar with the term, “sovereign citizen” is a general description for various people who deny the legitimacy of government and claim to live under common law separate from rules imposed by the state. That is, they go beyond the skepticism of government legitimacy shared by many people, including philosophical anarchists like Michael Huemer (I recommend his book, The Problem of Political Authority) and sometimes try to live by their ideas. They might refuse to use license plates and file liens against government officials while wielding garbled legal arguments that they—incorrectly—think will ward off unimpressed cops and judges.
Like anybody else, they’re occasionally dangerous. But mostly, they’re that guy who corners you at a party to tell you about his magic constitutional revelation that will immunize you against the income tax.
Sovereign citizens have found fertile ground in New Zealand, given a boost by the country’s harsh COVID-era restrictions. And, for some reason, they really upset government officials in that country.
“The Police Security Intelligence and Threats Group’s Operation Belfast in September 2022 aimed at identifying safety risks to staff from people influenced by Sovereign Citizen ideologies,” Hubbard added in her piece. “In most instances, no charges were laid in respect of a revocation process, unless the former licence holder had committed a criminal offence.”
Beliefs That Aren’t ‘Fit and Proper’
That’s right, the country’s police conducted a domestic intelligence operation to identify people who hold cranky ideological beliefs. They were stripped of their firearms licenses because they were no longer considered “fit and proper” to possess them.
I approached the New Zealand Police about the situation, but their press people refused to answer my questions. “Due to resourcing and our obligations to New Zealand media, we are declining your request for service,” I was told by email.
Strictly speaking, I didn’t ask for an oil change or a massage, just the sort of answers media representatives routinely cough up as part of their jobs. But if those are a service, I didn’t get them.
Still, the Waikato Times article gave me enough information to search through the Firearms Safety Authority website, where I found a requirement that an applicant for a firearms license be “a fit and proper person to possess and use firearms.” Among the potential disqualifiers for that status is if a person “exhibited, encouraged, or promoted violence, hatred, or extremism.”
‘Extremism’ Is in the Eye of the Beholding Politician
Extremism is one of those words that politicians find very useful for smearing their critics. Opposing viewpoints are always extreme relative to the speaker, so it’s easy enough for those in power to point fingers at those who disagree with them and call for unleashing the censors.
In fact, the New Zealand and French governments co-founded Christchurch Call, a campaign against “violent extremism content online.” The campaign immediately became an amorphous bludgeon against speech government officials just don’t like. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who tried to ban “hate speech” when in office and has compared words to weapons of war, now devotes herself to “combating online extremism.”
“For the past five years, New Zealand has been led by someone who has never really understood what free speech is, or why it’s so important,” Dr. James Kierstead, a research fellow with the New Zealand Initiative think tank, wrote in 2022 about then-Prime Minister Ardern.
So, perhaps it’s not surprising that New Zealand officials believe simply espousing views the powers-that-be regard as “extreme” is reason enough to strip people of a piece of their liberty.
Warnings for Americans
While most Americans don’t need licenses to own firearms, and we enjoy First Amendment protections for our speech and Second Amendment protections for owning the means of self-defense, we still need to consider the example of a liberal democratic government surveilling its own people and limiting the freedom of those found espousing “unacceptable” ideas. Just two years ago the FBI passed around a guide to “domestic terrorism symbols” that could indicate a proclivity for “militia violent extremism.” Among the allegedly worrisome symbols were the Gadsden flag, the Betsy Ross flag, a black-and-gold anarcho-capitalist flag, and “Revolutionary War imagery.” Getting tagged as an extremist isn’t difficult.
At the same time, the government attempted to suppress discussions on social media when they crossed imaginary lines of acceptable dissent to government policy or were just inconvenient to politicians.
“For law-abiding American gun owners, the Kiwis’ plight should serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of firearm registration, especially when coupled with a government that doesn’t care about an individual’s inherent rights, such as the right of their citizens to defend themselves and their families,” cautions the Second Amendment Foundation.
That’s absolutely true. While it’s not always possible to evade government mandates, registering your guns just puts them on a shopping list for sticky-fingered officials. That’s true of registering anything that you value and that powerful people might fear or covet.
Even more concerning, though, is the prospect of governments in supposedly free societies conducting intelligence operations against their people and punishing those who hold disapproved ideas. That’s a great argument for getting rid of the need for government permission to go about our lives. Politicians will never approve of those who disagree with them, but we shouldn’t need their approval.
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