Biden talks gun control, extremism with New Zealand’s PM
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden praised New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday for her success in curbing domestic extremism and guns as he tries to persuade a reluctant Congress to tighten gun laws in the aftermath of horrific mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York.
The long-planned talks between Biden and Ardern centered on trade, climate and security in the Indo-Pacific, but the two leaders’ starkly different experiences in pushing for gun control loomed large in the conversation.
Ardern successfully won passage of gun control measures in her country after a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two Christchurch mosques in 2019. Less than a month later, all but one of the country’s 120 lawmakers voted in favor of banning military-style semiautomatic weapons.
Biden told reporters at the start of his meeting with Ardern that he “will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you,” but the White House has acknowledged that winning new gun legislation will be an uphill climb in an evenly divided Congress.
Ardern offered condolences and said she stood ready to share “anything that we can share that would be of any value” from New Zealand’s experience.
It’s unclear what, if anything, from New Zealand could be applicable to the United States, which hasn’t passed a major federal gun control measure since soon after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut that left 26 dead.
A bipartisan group of senators were holding a private virtual meeting Tuesday to try to strike a compromise over gun safety legislation, but expectations remained low. Senators aren’t expected to even broach ideas for an assault weapon ban or
other restrictions that could be popular with the public as ways to curb the most lethal mass shootings.
Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler plans to hold a hearing Thursday on the “Protecting our Kids Act” — a package of eight bills that has almost no hopes of passing the Senate but would serve as a marker in the debate. It includes calls to raise the age limits on semi-automatic rifle purchases from 18 to 21 years old; create a grant program to buy back large-capacity magazines; establish voluntary safe practices for firearms storage and build on executive measures to ban bump stock devices and so-called ghost guns made from 3-D printing.
Ardern, in comments to reporters, said the two countries’ political systems are “very different.”
Speaking of the Christchurch shooting, she said that “in the aftermath of that, the New Zealand public had an expectation that if we knew what the problem was, that we do something about it. We had the ability with actually the near-unanimous support of parliamentarians to place a ban on semiautomatic military-style weapons and assault rifles and so we did that. But the New Zealand public set the expectations first and foremost.”