Just days after a terrorist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, gunning dead 50 worshippers and injuring dozens in a hail of bullets, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on military style semi-automatics (MSSA) and assault rifles. The terrorist, a self-avowed white-supremacist, had wielded more than one semi-automatic weapon during his murderous assault, heightening the lethality of the attack. “On 15 March our history changed forever. Now, our laws will too,” Ms. Ardern said, explaining that the changes to the gun laws were aimed at making the country a safer place. That it took the lives of 50 people for New Zealand to tighten its gun laws is tragic, but the alacrity with which Ms. Ardern reacted in imposing the ban on MSSA and assault rifles has deservedly won her global acclaim. While New Zealanders don’t enjoy a constitutional right to bear arms — like the U.S. Second Amendment protection — the island nation of just under five million people has traditionally had a high level of gun ownership, with estimates putting the figure upwards of 1.2 million firearms. In a clear reflection of the national mood and the readiness of the political class to take rapid and resolute action against the deadly weapons, the government won bipartisan agreement ahead of the ban, and the Opposition National Party leader endorsed it. New Zealand joins its neighbour across the Tasman Sea, Australia, in outlawing semi-automatics.
In Australia’s case too, the 1996 National Firearms Agreement and buyback programme followed a deadly massacre in Tasmania’s Port Arthur earlier that year. A lone gunman had used a semi-automatic rifle to shoot and kill 35 people, and wound 18 others, in a rampage across multiple locations in the popular tourist area. The fact that MSSA are almost twice as deadly in killing and maiming victims at the far end of a violent shooter’s sights was affirmed by a study published last September in The Journal of the American Medical Association . The researchers found that given their ease of use, capacity to accept large magazines and fire high-velocity bullets, the semi-automatics were significantly more lethal. Both nations, however, allow licensed ownership of firearms, especially by farmers who need them for “pest control and animal welfare”, and Ms. Ardern has now vowed to move on tightening the licensing rules in New Zealand. That the terrorist, an Australian, chose Christchurch to carry out his rampage shows Canberra’s strict licensing and registration norms have had a deterrent effect. It should be a prompt for the U.S. to proactively move to tighten its gun laws, before more innocent lives are lost in preventable mass shootings.
