Firearms Minister Expresses Extraordinary Ignorance of Mosque Shooting Circumstances

Remember when a guy walked into a mosque and shot everyone inside? He killed 44 people. And he then drove to a second mosque and shot and killed 7 more. He was on his way to a third mosque in Ashburton when he was stopped and arrested by the New Zealand Police.

I find it hard to forget. Maybe it’s because it happened in my city and so I feel a strange sense of compassion and communal responsibility for the 51 people killed that day. That was 51 people who once made up the lifeblood of Christchurch, now gone, as well as hundreds more—thousands more—who were injured, traumatised, or who devastatingly lost loved ones in New Zealand’s first and worst race-inspired terror event.

At least I hope it will remain our worst.

Perhaps it’s because I worked on a documentary exploring just a small aspect of the aftermath of the attacks, and so I’ll never in my life forget some of the things said by the survivors and grieving family members in their interviews: the scenes of horror they described, the deep mental scars they bore, the father who died before he ever got to hold his daughter waiting for him in Christchurch neonatal ICU, the kiwi convert who’d been holding out excitedly for her gold card so she could finally get her free bus rides before she was murdered at the age of 64.

These are the people who were harmed and killed in previously unimaginable ways by our lax gun laws.

Three year old Mucad Ibrihim, the youngest victim of the March 15th Mosque shooting.

Our firearms minister, Nicole McKee, however, seems entirely unburdened with such thoughts and feelings about Aotearoa’s greatest tragedy, or even with knowledge that it happened. Just yesterday she expressed shock and surprise that police would be considering our firearms laws from the perspective that gangs, criminals, and potential terrorists may in fact have access to ammunition and firearms via legitimate means.

source: One News

I wish I could be so blissfully ignorant.

Let me refresh your memory on how the mosque shootings happened.

Brenton Tarrant was active on firearms ranges from his first ever visit to New Zealand in 2013. After he moved to Dunedin, he became a member of the South Otago gun club and regularly practiced on their shooting range. He was given an A-endorsed firearms license in 2017, bought his four guns and ammunition from a city gun store, and was a frequent customer of legitimate sellers and suppliers. This is all despite a long history of mental health concerns and overt racism requiring intervention as a child from the age of ten, radicalism that began young and continued throughout his life, as well as many incidents both with police in New Zealand and overseas that were not properly identified, recorded, or followed-up on over a number of years. He owned more than 7000 rounds of ammunition and had altered his weapons against the terms of his licence. But every one of them was purchased legitimately.

Brenton Tarrant selected New Zealand for his massacre partly because of this reason.

There were many, many opportunities where the systems that protect us should have identified him as a threat, or where he should have been denied a license or means of murder for sending up just so many red flags, but that did not happen, and 51 people died. And now our Prime Minister has described the reversal of further regulations to prevent a future tragedy from occurring as “tweaks” while our firearms minister seems to believe that these laws were passed to protect only against “gang members” who hold their license illegally.

It is controversial to use Brenton Tarrant’s real name, but I have done so here very deliberately. Humans are social creatures, and also very fallible ones, and because of our efforts to avoid martyring him or bestowing any sort of infamy upon him, there is a disturbing lack of awareness from New Zealanders about the circumstances that allowed this shooting to happen. This has spawned from the best of intentions, but is now being taken advantage of by a deeply conservative populist government who want to cover over these events with a coat of white paint in order to weaken our firearms laws for lobbyists and the swathes of rural voters who feel hard-done-by by the sudden but necessary tightening of restrictions on their ability to own and use weapons they have previously had much easier access to.

I will not argue with those who believe there is some balancing still to be done in order to ensure that these radical and rushed changes that were enacted by the Labour/Greens/NZFirst governments in response to a mass tragedy are, in fact, doing what they were designed to do (while also not unnecessarily restricting access to legitimate users in exchange). It seems very likely to me given the circumstances of their passing that such proponents of changes to these laws are correct, and this is a discussion we need to have as a nation. But these changes are not something that can be supported, not when they are being pushed onto the public deceptively by a former lobbyist who is hand-waving over the very reason they exist while pushing blame and shame onto the New Zealand Police.

Thats a theme with Nicole McKee, by the way.

Further reading: Police Association urges PM to strip gun reform portfolio from the ACT minister

This regulation is just one of a number that aims to add layers to our protections that prevent such events from happening again in the future. But Nicole McKee feels that these make owning and using a gun too hard and expensive (which is bad for the bottom lines of the firearms industry, who gave her a career and will probably have a large hand in continuing it) and so we should start stripping these protections away. Even though all the already-existing layers of protection did not prevent the tragedy that was March 15th. Or the Aramoana Massacre. Or the 2023 Auckland Shooting. Or the Raurimu Massacre. Or the Schlapfer or Bain family murders. Or the Baset Road machine gun murders. Or the Noema Rika murders.

Let’s not let this list grow any longer, New Zealand.