She said the man arrested in the attacks on two Christchurch mosques had purchased his weapons legally and enhanced their capacity by using 30-round magazines “done easily through a simple online purchase”.
“Related parts used to convert these guns into MSSAs are also being banned, along with all high-capacity magazines,” she said.
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“In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country.”
Ardern said the interim measures announced on Thursday will stop a rush of purchases before legislation on the measures takes effect next month.
She added there would be some limited exemptions for New Zealand’s farmers, many of whom require firearms for pest control and management of their livestock.
White supremacist suspect
Ardern’s move came six days after a gunman entered the Al Noor and Linwood mosques and killed 50 people in an indiscriminate shooting spree.
Police confirmed on Thursday that all 50 victims of the attack had been identified by coroners, while funerals continued to take place as relatives collected their loved ones’ bodies from authorities.
“I can say that, as of a few minutes ago, the identification process and to all 50 victims has been completed and all of the next of kin have been advised,” Police Commissioner Mike Bush said at a press conference in Wellington.
“That is a landmark for this process,” he added.
Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a white supremacist who was living in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, has been charged with murder following the attack on Friday.
However, police said in a statement on Thursday that the person he was formally accused of killing had been wrongly declared dead, adding Tarrant’s charge sheet would be updated when he next appeared in court on April 5.
Tarrant, who was remanded without a plea in his initial court appearance on Saturday, is expected to face more charges then.
The scale of the attack he is suspected to have carried out has caused global revulsion, including for his use of social media to livestream the carnage in real-time.
In a rambling “manifesto”, Tarrant said he was motivated partly by a desire to stoke religious conflict between Islam and the West by targetting “invaders”.
‘Well-considered and overdue’
Analysts welcomed the prime minister’s move on weapons legislation in response to the massacre, saying despite the nation’s outpouring of grief over the incident, “thoughts and prayers don’t make much difference” but “actions” do.
“What we are seeing at the moment is not political populism, or politicians taking advantage of a terrible situation, it’s actually highlighting political inertia from the past,” Jarrod Gilbert, a senior lecturer on crime and justice at the New Zealand-based University of Canterbury, told Al Jazeera.
Ardern had previously cited Australia’s decision to change its gun laws 12 days after the country’s 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed, as a blueprint for amending New Zealand’s laws, saying “we will do it in less”.
Previous governments failed to implement recommendations made by Justice Thomas Thorp in his government-backed 1997 review of firearms control in New Zealand.
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