Almost every Democrat running for president supports so-called “gun buybacks.” Too bad they don’t work.

Proposals range from Joe Biden’s voluntary gun buybacks to the more radical mandatory confiscation proposed by Cory Booker. (He still misleadingly calls it a “buyback.”) So it’s worth examining how such buybacks played out recently in New Zealand, which passed a ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons and a mandatory gun buyback program after a tragic shooting in April.

The deadline for the mandatory gun buyback program was Friday. The New Zealand program successfully led to the compensated confiscation of 51,000 of the targeted firearms. But as the left-leaning Guardian newspaper reports, this is out of an estimated 170,000 such guns currently in circulation. And there are still a minimum of 1.2 million legally owned firearms in New Zealand on top of that.

This means that many people ignored the demand that they turn in their guns and trust the supposedly benevolent government to protect them from themselves.