New Zealand’s government is planning further restrictions to gun ownership in a law proposed Monday that emphasizes owning guns is a privilege and not a right.
The new law would ban the sale of guns to overseas visitors, create a register to track all guns in the country, and require gun owners to renew their gun licenses every five years instead of every 10. It would also allow police to weigh other factors such as a person’s mental health and even what they had been posting on social media to determine whether they were fit to own a gun.
The government hopes lawmakers will approve the legislation by the end of the year.
The proposed measures come after New Zealand in April rushed through legislation to ban so-called military-style weapons such as AR-15 style rifles after a lone gunman in March killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.
The government has launched a buyback scheme to compensate people for the outlawed semi-automatics, and has so far collected and destroyed more than 3,200 weapons. The gun buyback and amnesty runs until December.
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