Imagine a country that bans military-assault weapons after a horrific white supremacist attack kills 50 Muslim citizens and immigrants while they pray. Imagine a country where its leader embraces the victims and their communities as their own, rejects the assailant, and refuses to speak his name, denying him the notoriety he seeks. Imagine a country where the major advertisers pull adds from Facebook and Twitter because of their irresponsible failure to delete hate content (“After N.Z. carnage, big tech must change,” Editorial, March 16).
New Zealand has just done all of this in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. The language about firearms has been careful and measured – the target of the assault-weapons ban is a class of weapons, not gun-owners. The buy-back program announced is to be enforced by fines and imprisonment and curtails any possibility of a rush to buy more weapons before the ban goes into effect. Also prohibited will be devices to turn firearms into semiautomatic weapons or have high magazine capacity, because such weapons should never be available in the civilian market.
Germany already prohibits Twitter from having any posts with Nazi or neo-Nazi language. This is the kind of action and leadership we in the United States and so many other countries desperately need. May all the many groups organizing for better gun control, for action to curtail white supremacist terrorism, for regulation to end the tech giant’s irresponsible handling of hate content, and for ways to stand up for values that protect fundamental human rights take heart.
Nancy Krieger
Jamaica Plain
The writer is a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.