PM couldn’t mention US shootings, even if she’d wanted to

When Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer took a sabbatical in New Zealand more than a decade ago, he used it as an opportunity to write a book contrasting the ideals that mark each nation. Capturing its essence in the title, ‘‘Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States’’, it inventories the stark differences in our core values.

Hackett contends that Americans value freedom and liberty above all else, while in Aotearoa, our society prizes fairness, with those values forged in the two countries’ colonial pasts.

If Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hasn’t read the book, she’s become well acquainted with those different values during her visit to the US this week. This trip was important for the prime minister personally, as she became the first New Zealander to give the Harvard commencement speech, while New Zealand was able to announce to the world that we’re open for business.

But it was stories of gun violence in both countries that threw the spotlight on those different values. In the US, the slaying of 19 primary school children and two adults at Robb Elementary School became yet another addition to the rollcall of mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary to Columbine High School.

Nothing encapsulates America’s belief in freedom and liberty better than the right to bear arms. It’s enshrined in the Constitution’s Second Amendment and has become a politicised weapon of mass destruction thanks to all-powerful lobby group the National Rifle Association.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut summed it up succinctly when he said, ‘‘Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking they might be shot that day.’’

And if the fact that, on an average day in the US, more than 35 people lose their lives to guns has you bewildered and asking why, it left the prime minister not willing to publicly talk about another country’s problems.

However, the topic did feature in Ardern’s meetings with US senators. They wanted to know how she managed to pull off what up until now they haven’t managed – a nationwide ban on semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles, which she achieved in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. It was one of the reasons Harvard had proffered for inviting her to speak this week.

But if the US senators had investigated a little further, they would have discovered that the PM’s record on gun control has been a case of two steps forward, one step back.

Case in point, last week’s Budget announcement that $208 million would be allocated for a firearms register nearly three years after Ardern had first announced it in July 2019. National Party leader Christopher Luxon announced this week that his party would reallocate the money to allow police to target illegal guns, while the NZ Council of Licensed Firearms pointed out that, because the register relied on serial numbers, criminals would simply remove them.

There was another reason the prime minister would have been hesitant to preach about gun control; it’s called the pot calling the kettle black.

Thirteen drive-by shootings in Auckland since Sunday, the result of internecine gang warfare, hardly gives the impression that New Zealand is an exemplar of gun control. The fact that seven of those shootings occurred in a single night, often at homes with no criminal connections, is evidence that the illegal gun trade is managing to operate unimpeded in New Zealand.

How many of those guns would have had the serial numbers scrubbed off, or been illegally smuggled into this country? That no-one has lost their life yet is miraculous. Meanwhile, innocent people are left terrified of being shot as they sleep.

But at least here, in the wake of the mosque attacks, the ban on semiautomatics received pan-political support.

America’s political system is atrophied on gun control with the Republicans weaponising the issue. Notions of freedom and liberty have made the country an outlier and the numbers paint a tragic story in the wake of the Ulvade shootings.

Since 2014, The Gun Violence Archive estimates 34,500 children have been killed or injured in shooting incidents, more than 6500 of those under the age of 12. Gun availability is the big issue, with the US having the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. What’s more, gun sales have doubled since the pandemic with nearly two million a month being sold in 2020.

Which poses the inevitable questions:

How is it right that children are losing their lives for going to school? How does that enshrine freedom and liberty?

While the US begins its hand-wringing over yet another mass shooting, it’s timely to remember that it takes three days before anger dissipates after a shooting, according to a study by two Princeton scholars.

Patrick Sharkey and Yinzhi Shen examined Gallup surveys of American’s self-reported emotions in the days before and after a mass shooting. They found that the more horrific the massacre, the greater the impact on the local community.

Democrats reported a 50% increase in sadness, with Republicans experiencing a 20% rise.

But the desolation abated at the same rapid rate. Three days.

Which allows US politicians to continue doing what they’ve always done. Look the other way.