New Zealand’s prime minister has said she cannot understand America’s failure to ban automatic and semi-automatic guns, despite dozens of mass shootings.
Jacinda Ardern told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in unusually blunt language: “Australia experienced a massacre and changed its laws. New Zealand has had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I don’t understand the United States.”
Ardern is in Paris where she is lobbying countries and global tech companies to sign the “Christchurch Call”, a voluntary pledge that aims to eradicate terrorist and violent content online in the wake of the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s modern history.
The US is not sending anyone to the meeting of digital ministers from the Group of 7 nations to discuss the plan, and is not intending to sign the pledge.
Ardern said that before the Christchurch mosque shootings on 15 March, in which 51 people died, New Zealand had “pretty permissive gun legislation”.
But despite New Zealand being a hunting and food-producing nation, that was not justification enough for access to high-powered military-style rifles, Ardern said, and the Labour coalition government passed legislation banning access within weeks of the massacre.
“We will continue to be a food-producing nation that deals with animal welfare issues and so on, and has a practical purpose and use for guns, but you can draw a line and say that that does not mean that you need access to military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. You do not. And New Zealanders, by and large, absolutely agreed with that position,” Ardern said.
Six days after the Christchurch mosque attacks, the New Zealand the government announced it would ban all military-style semi-automatics (MSSA) and assault rifles in New Zealand. Related parts used to convert these guns into MSSAs were also banned, along with all high-capacity magazines.
In the days and weeks after the Christchurch shootings, hundreds of New Zealanders voluntarily surrendered their weapons to police, before an official government buy-back scheme was launched that is expected to cost NZ$100-200m ($65m-$130m).
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