Under New Zealand’s new mandatory buyback confiscation law, owners of semi-automatic firearms have until September 30 to turn them in. But based on this Reuters report, authorities are expecting only a fraction of those who own the newly outlawed guns to comply.
Police Deputy Police Commissioner Michael Clement told a news conference on Thursday that they are not sure how many guns they would receive as New Zealand has no law requiring people to register firearms.
“Its a great unknown question…everybody appreciates that there is no register of firearms with regards to the type of firearms we are talking about,” Clement said.
“So It could be in the tens of thousands, it could be more,” he added.
There are about 1.2-1.5 million firearms in New Zealand, according to gunpolicy.org. Of these, the government has said that a record of licenses show 13,500 firearms are military style semi-automatics (MSSAs). But the number could be higher.
– Praveen Menon in New Zealand police expect tens of thousands of firearms in guns buy-back scheme