New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, doesn’t get it. Why hasn’t the United State’s passed harsher gun laws? Maybe she’s never been to Chicago?
Perhaps she never heard of Columbine which happened during an actual “assault weapons” ban.
All that aside, in the very next breath, after saying she didn’t understand, she answers her own question.
“Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States,” she said.
She then spearheaded a call for the world’s biggest internet platforms to remove extremist content online after a livestream of the suspected gunman’s attack was shared on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Neither New Zealand nor Australia has a First and Second Amendment. So it is easy for a politician to say, let’s take some guns, and then, let’s ban speech we’ve decided is extremist without ever connecting one with the other.
I’m inclined to mail her a copy of Animal Farm.
While there is genuine extremism online, and private business is free to moderate such content to its own success, or peril, Government’s that decide what these things (self-defense or free speech) look like are destined to spiral into tyrannies.
That’s why.
You even label popular firearms (and speech) to give legitimacy to your confiscatory predilections.
These tools are bad. These words are bad. Give them to us. We know better. It’s for your own safety.
Actually, it is for yours, and the sooner you admit it, the better.
| CNN
