NORWAY BANS SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPONS

Norwegian flags and flowers are seen in Sundvollen, close to Utoya island,
 in the background, where a gunman killed 69 people in 2011.
Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

OSLO : Norway plans to ban semi-automatic arms as of 2021, a decade after right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik's mass shooting that left 69 people dead, a Norwegian lawmaker said on 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 favor 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, said.

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 Feb 14.

The massacre in Norway took place on  July 22, 2011, when disguised a s a police officer and armed with a Ruger Mini-14 semi automatic rifle and Glock pistol-

Breivik killed - 69 people, most of them teenagers who were attending a Labour Party Youth Camp.

[AFP]