Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He has a PhD in Public Policy from George Washington University and has been director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues.

Earlier this year he published War and the Rogue Presidency Restoring the Republic after Congressional Failure.

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So here’s a thing.

A common talking point on gun control, for

people discussing banning assault rifles, military-grade weapons, or any

particularly category of guns, or all guns for that matter, is the difficulty

of actually removing any guns that were banned from the people who currently

own them.

The people who have guns are probably the

sort of people who aren’t all that minded to give them up, and on top of that,

they are the sort of people who, you know, have guns, so that’s an issue. My

cold dead hands and all that.

Gun control advocates say that wouldn’t be

such a problem as it’s made out to be, and their opponents say that it’s not

really on because it’s the sort of problem where you don’t know how big the

problem is until you have that problem, and that’s not a good position to be

in.

But now we have a test case.

On the March 15 an Australian immigrant murdered 51

people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, apparently

motivated by alt-right white nationalist ideology. He was arrested and will be

tried next year, but in the immediate aftermath the prime minister announced

that there would major new restrictions to firearm ownership.

Before the attack, there was relatively

little control on the ownership of guns in New Zealand, it was probably the

only developed country other than the United States not to require the registration

of firearms, although they did require the registration of the type of

automatic rifles that were to be banned.