Just hours after an armed individual entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and gunned down at least 19 children and three adults, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern was visibly emotional.

"When I watch from afar and see events such as this today, it's not as a politician," she told talk show host Stephen Colbert. "I see them just as a mother. I'm so sorry for what has happened here."

Three years ago, it took just one massacre for Ardern to change her country's gun laws.

On March 15, 2019, a lone gunman entered two separate mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch and carried out two consecutive mass shootings, killing a total of 51 people and injuring 40 more. Just seven days later, on March 21, Arden announced a national ban on semi-automatic weapons, and less than a month later, military-style semi-automatics, assault rifles, and associated parts were made illegal.

In comparison, the Texas shooting was the U.S.' 252nd mass shooting of 2022 alone. It is the worst school shooting at a U.S. grade school since 2012--when a gunman killed 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut--and the worst mass shooting ever at a school in Texas. It is also the 4,634th mass shooting to have taken place in the U.S. since the start of 2013. 

The statistics have left much of the world, particularly New Zealanders, dumbfounded.