In the aftermath of any deadly attack, a lot of people will start asking questions. The more rare such an attack is, the more high-profile the questioning will be.
And with something like Christchurch, the questions are definitely going to be asked.
However, I came across a report of an inquest into the shooting, and something about it just rubbed me so completely wrong.
The Christchurch terror attack was foreseeable and successive governments failed to close the loophole that allowed the gunman access to military-style firearms, the inquest into the 51 worshippers murdered at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre has heard.
The inquest is examining gun laws at the time of the March 2019 shootings.
University of Waikato terrorism and firearms expert Professor Alexander Gillespie told the inquest the “system for both the licensing of firearms and the regulation of particularly dangerous firearms platforms before 15 March 2019 was critically flawed”.
“What occurred was foreseeable in terms of both the lax controls around both the legal and the illegal market for firearms,” he said.
“Post the terror attack, the system has been improved considerably. However, the new system has not adopted innovations to reduce the threat even more to which New Zealand could learn from practices already evident in some comparable countries.
“Finally, for the licensing authority, entrenched guidance on how to identify and deal with concerning people who may hold extreme views, but do not cross the threshold for criminal conviction, should be given.”
In 2016, Gillespie told a parliamentary select committee that another tragedy on the scale of Aramoana was foreseeable due to the lack of control over so-called military-style semi-automatic firearms.
So, the name “Aramoana” was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t recall why. From context, though, it’s clear it was a massacre of some sort; a significant one of that’s being used as a metric.
I figured I needed to look it up. I was unsure of just why I was unfamiliar with it, though.
It turns out, it was from 1990.
That’s right. This “we’re going to have another tragedy just like this one” attack was from almost 30 years previous to Christchurch.
If the issue was simply the availability of these kinds of guns, then why did it take nearly 30 years for another such attack?
What we have here, it seems, is someone who preached doom and gloom for decades until it happened, then took great pains to tell everyone he was right. It’s like that guy who hates a particular sports team and says over and over they’re going to lose. Eventually, he’s going to be right, which is fine. But then he prances about telling everyone how smart he is because he called it, all while ignoring all the times he got it wrong.
While it’s unfortunate, on a long enough timeline, we will see mass shootings. Australia has seen numerous public mass shootings following the Port Arthur massacre, all despite the extensive gun control laws the country put in place. The UK enacted tons of gun control after Dunblane in 1996. They’ve seen a number of mass murders since then.
So for Gillespie to sit there and say, “I saw it coming!” is fine. I can see another one coming sooner or later in New Zealand. What bothers me is that he’s getting away with saying it was the lack of gun control ignoring the truth, that people get broken and enraged and want to slaughter innocent people.
Taking one category of guns off the table doesn’t change that. Taking all guns off the table hasn’t changed that in any other nation where they’ve tried it.
