New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed Tuesday’s deadly mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, offering insight on how her country responded with a stricter gun control law in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre when a gunman murdered 51 people.
Host Stephen Colbert asked Ardern, who was a guest on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show, about the Robb Elementary School shooting, which had occurred earlier Tuesday and so far has led to the deaths of 19 schoolchildren and two adults in what has become the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
Colbert related how his last visit to New Zealand in 2019 happened a few months after the Christchurch shooting, in the wake of which “the New Zealand parliament took action to remove guns from the streets.” Colbert then asked Ardern how New Zealand was able to enact gun control.
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“I think about what happened to us, and all I can reflect is we are a very pragmatic people. When we saw something like that happen, everyone said never again. So then it was incumbent on us as politicians to respond to that,” said Ardern.
In the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, New Zealand enacted stricter rules on gun sales and ownership, which saw a ban on nearly all semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles as well as magazines and parts. The new gun law was passed by New Zealand’s parliament near-unanimously, with only a single dissenting vote.
Ardern explained that New Zealand did not totally ban firearms, as “we have a legitimate need for guns in our country for things like pest control and to protect our biodiversity,” but, she said, “you don’t need a military-style semiautomatic weapon to do that. And so we got rid of them”
The prime minister then said that New Zealand’s government instituted a gun buy-back scheme, so people could turn in their weapons and be compensated.
Ardern ended the discussion by saying that New Zealand’s approach to gun control was not perfect, and there are instances of “guns that are misused” in the country, but she added that the public and politicians “saw something that wasn’t right, and we acted on it.”
See the interview below.
