Friday’s atrocity in Christchurch has had the effect of concentrating the New Zealand government’s mind on gun control.The fact that it took a massacre to reach that point says much about the government’s fear of the gun lobby (read: voters) than actually protecting its citizens from madmen.Of course there will be gun nuts who say the madman is the exception that proves the rule that 99.9% of owners of semi-automatic weapons do not go around killing unarmed people in their places of worship.While that may be true, it doesn’t alter the fact that a man —who happened to be a Caucasian immigrant from Australia — was able to walk into a gun shop and acquire a semi-automatic assault rifle and a shotgun without too much difficulty.The comments sections of various news sites are also alive with the usual lunacy that what was missing on Friday was a "good guy with a gun to take out the bad guy".That the good guy who ended the shooting happened to be armed only with a credit card machine an...

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