New Zealand Needed Six Days to Ban Military-Style Firearms for Good

The moral, rational response to mass shootings is the one at which America fails every time.

Last Friday, an avowed white supremacist wielding an assault rifle burst into two Christchurch mosques during afternoon prayers, murdering 50 people in what is far and away the worst terrorist attack in New Zealand’s history. On Thursday—so, less than a week later—Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a nationwide ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, which she expects to be fully implemented by mid-April. “Our history changed forever,” she said. “Now, our laws will, too.”

The changes take effect immediately, and will encompass more than just a prospective sales ban. Ardern revealed that the country will also implement a buyback program to take affected military-style semiautomatic weapons, or MSSAs, out of circulation for good. (Estimated cost: between $100 and $200 million.) As soon as this weekend, MSSA owners will be able to turn in their weapons at police stations for safe destruction, no questions asked. “We just want the guns back,” she pleaded. “It’s about all of us.”

Once the amnesty period has ended, MSSA owners will face fines of about $2,700 or up to three years in prison. The Class E license that is required to buy and deal MSSAs will functionally cease to exist. “I can assure people there is no point in applying for such a permit,” she said. Ardern also made clear that the country isn’t done, calling these merely the “first tranche” of firearms reforms; in the months to come, she expects the legislature to take a hard look at registration requirements, licensing, mandatory storage, and other forms of regulation.

Meanwhile, here in America, the murders of 20 first-graders and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 prompted Congress—after four months of debate—to reject both a modest assault-weapons ban and a bipartisan proposal that would have mandated universal background checks. In 2017, the murders of 58 Las Vegas concertgoers elicited meek, fruitless legislative efforts to outlaw bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. (Relying on its executive authority, the Trump administration eventually banned bump stocks, but only after lawmakers failed to act.)

At last, in 2018, the murders of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the national outpourings of rage and fear and grief that ensued led the House to pass the STOP School Violence Act, which earmarks federal funds that schools can use to purchase metal detectors, door locks, and anonymous threat-reporting services. “By providing critical resources to schools to strengthen their security infrastructure and train teachers, administrators, and law enforcement officers to intervene, we can save countless lives,” said Utah senator Orrin Hatch. As to guns, the tools that make it possible to so easily take the lives of which he spoke, the bill is silent.

There are structural reasons New Zealand was able to mobilize in a way the United States has never been able to do; its unicameral legislative structure, for example—one Parliament, not a separate House and Senate—makes it easier for consensus bills to sail through the process. But also, it happened because New Zealand’s government is composed of decent people who see it as their responsibility to respond to devastating tragedies by doing everything within their power to ensure that such devastating tragedies do not occur again. Gun violence is a moral issue, not a partisan one. (Ardern hails from the progressive Labour Party, but leaders of both the center-right National Party and far-right New Zealand First party have already pledged their support.)

It also happened because New Zealand has no equivalent to the Second Amendment, and thus no stubborn cadre of its citizenry who insist that some 250 years after its enactment, a constitutional provision that prohibits disarmament of colonial-era militias must operate as an inviolable, latent suicide pact. The calculus is simple in New Zealand, as it was in Australia and in other countries that respond to firearms-fueled massacres with tough, decisive action: People are dead because of assault rifles, and so for the common good, the assault rifles must go.

Most importantly, these reforms happened because politicians in New Zealand do not live in mortal fear of incurring the National Rifle Association's wrath, and feel empowered to do what they think is right, instead of what is least likely to elicit attack ads during their next re-election bid. The American gun lobby’s power has so warped our conception of what is possible that to us, every instance of meaningful gun reform now seems astonishing. What New Zealand just did is not astonishing, though. It is the only safe, rational, and sane thing to do. We are the insane ones. We just don't realize it anymore.