How political system in New Zealand restricted guns days after Texas school shooting

A week after the world witnessed a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, most Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the United States remain divided on whether gun law reform is the answer in preventing similar incidents.

However, New Zealand experienced a rare mass shooting in 2019 that left as many as 50 people dead and many others injured, such reform took just a matter of days.

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On Tuesday, after meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about her country’s successful push to ban most semiautomatic firearms.

The mass school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was met with massive widespread grief and anger, but the incident also inspired comparisons to other countries and how they respond to such events.

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Last week, Biden said that he was “struck” with the thought that “these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.”

“They have mental health problems,” Biden said. “They have domestic disputes in other countries. They have people who are lost. But these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency that they happen in America.”

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Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, Ardern said that in the aftermath of the 2019 shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, the public “had an expectation that if we knew what the problem was, that we do something about it.”

“Now, the context I have to give is that our political system is very different,” she said. “We had the ability with, actually, the unanimous support of parliamentarians to place a ban on semiautomatic, military-style weapons and assault rifles. So we did that.”

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Ardern had announced a temporary ban on the weapons days after the deadly attack, and within weeks lawmakers had voted 119-1 to make it permanent.

Ardern noted there were very few occasions in her experience “when I have seen Parliament come together in this way, and I cannot imagine circumstances where that is more necessary than it is now.”

During the speech, she made a point of paying tribute to the opposition, who she said was “nothing but constructive” from the moment the semiautomatic weapons issue emerged.