New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern to Visit White House After Gun Control Push

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will be hosted at the White House on Tuesday less than a week after she delivered an impassioned gun control speech at Harvard University.

The left-wing NZ Labour Party leader’s trip to the White House will be the first visit from a leader of a South Pacific island nation since 2014.

“Biden and Ardern will discuss the existing partnership between the U.S. and New Zealand as well as their desire for a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” reported The Hill. “They will also ‘discuss strengthening cooperation to support the Pacific Islands region’ and economic matters.”

Aside from discussions about the Indo-Pacific economic framework and New Zealand’s revitalized trade and tourism industry in the shadow of the coronavirus, Ardern and Biden will also talk “about the climate crisis, ways to tackle terrorism and the ‘radicalization to violence both off and online.'”

Last week, following the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered, the prime minister earned a standing ovation at Harvard University when she advocated for gun control and how her government curtailed gun ownership in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.

“We knew we needed significant gun reform, and so that is what we did,” she said. “But we also knew that if we wanted genuine solutions to the issue of violent extremism online, it would take government, civil society and the tech companies themselves to change the landscape.”

Ardern, a former president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, led her government to put severe restrictions on semiautomatic firearms and high-capacity magazines in the wake of the shooting.

“This imperfect but precious way that we organize ourselves, that has been created to give equal voice to the weak and to the strong, that is designed to help drive consensus – it is fragile,” Ardern said.

“For years it feels as though we have assumed that the fragility of democracy was determined by duration.  That somehow the strength of your democracy was like a marriage; the longer you’d been in it, the more likely it was to stick.”