Hours after 50 worshippers were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was already promising to tighten up the country’s gun laws. It’s a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s reaction to mass shootings, a written-by-numbers offer of “thoughts and prayers”, then a twiddle of his thumbs until the next atrocity. New Zealand’s response seems to have more in common with Scotland where the massacre at Dunblane primary school in 1996 led to a ban on all handguns.
There are some pronounced differences between the two countries. New Zealand’s gun laws are lax; the UK’s gun laws had already been tightened and semi-automatic centrefire rifles banned in the wake of the Hungerford massacre in 1987. But what Scotland and New Zealand share is little previous experience of spree shootings, a visceral shock at the scale of their country’s loss and a determination to prevent it happening again.
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