Promise to look at gun laws

NEW Zealand is normally peaceful and calm – and has plenty of guns.

The country’s reputation as a laidback and safe country, where even the police are mostly unarmed, belies easy access to weapons and a private firearm ownership rate among the highest in the world.

That has been thrown into the spotlight by the killing of 49 people by a shooter rampaging through two Christchurch mosques with an arsenal of high-powered guns.

It has prompted an immediate promise of stricter gun laws from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said the mosque attacker was a licensed gun owner and five firearms were used during the rampage, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns.

The weapons also appeared to have been modified, Ardern told reporters in Christchurch yesterday.

“That’s a challenge that we will look to address in changing our laws,” she said. Rules in New Zealand require gun owners to be licensed, but unlike Australia, laws do not require all weapons to be registered, giving authorities poor oversight of the country’s firearms, according to Gunpolicy.org.

“The police don’t have a clue how many guns there really are in New Zealand,” said Philip Alpers, an Australia-based expert in gun laws and director of Gunpolicy.org.

He said New Zealand, with a population of just under 5 million, had an estimated 1.5 million firearms.

Military-style semi-automatic rifles, banned in neighbouring Australia, are permitted in New Zealand but must be registered.

In Australia, which is seen as culturally similar to New Zealand and has lively farming and hunting communities, the catalyst for outlawing high-powered weapons was the shooting of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996. |