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| Police and emergency services search the waters for victims some around Utoeya island, some 40 km southwest of Oslo, on July 23, 2011, after a bombing in central Oslo and a series of shootings on an island just outside the capital |
Norway
plans to ban semi-automatic firearms as of 2021, a decade after right-wing
extremist Anders Behring Breivik's mass shooting that left 69 people dead, a
Norwegian lawmaker said Tuesday.
The
minority right-wing government had presented a proposal on the ban last year.
"Today
(Tuesday), it has become clear that there is a parliamentary majority in favour
of the government's proposal. Semi-automatic weapons will therefore be banned
in Norway," Peter Frolich, a Conservative member of parliament's standing
committee on judicial affairs, told AFP.
The ban,
which would enter into force in 2021, comes amid renewed debate on
semi-automatic weapons in the United States, following a school shooting in
Florida that claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers on February 14.
The
massacre in Norway took place on July 22, 2011, when disguised as a police
officer and armed with a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock pistol,
Breivik killed 69 people, most of them teenagers who were attending a Labour
Party youth camp.
Just a few
hours before the camp attack, he had killed eight people in a bombing outside a
government building in Oslo.
In a 2012
report, a commission tasked with drawing conclusions from the attacks had
called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons, one of its 31 recommendations.
"This
decision is a very good thing, even if it comes belatedly," the head of a
victims' support group, Lisbeth Kristine Royneland, said.
The bill
allows for several exemptions, in particular for shooting sports.
Frolich
attributed the long delay in drafting the proposal to the fact that many
hunters in Norway use semi-automatic firearms.
It was not
immediately clear how the new law would affect hunters.
Breivik,
39, who now goes by the name Fjotolf Hansen, was sentenced in 2012 to 21 years
in prison, which can be extended indefinitely as long as he remains a threat to
society.
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