A man wakes up, he’s slept fitfully. He’s excited, nervous and focused as today is the day. A day two years in the making. He showers, grabs something to eat and loads up the car. He checks his social media, the live stream is ready to go. By the time he parks his car the bright morning has clouded over. He gathers himself and runs through what he’s about to do one last time. Then he turns on his live feed.
‘Let’s get this party started,’ he says. Marching music begins to play.
Taking his gun, a military style semi automatic weapon inscribed with white symbols and ideological messages he walks through the open gates of a mosque into its car park. Ignoring someone who quickly changes their mind about getting out of their vehicle, he moves towards the entrance of the mosque. Al Noor mosque is a modern, white walled building in which Muslims have congregated for afternoon prayers.
The man raises his weapon, he focuses on controlling his breathing. He must stay calm if he is to accomplish his mission. A man exits the mosque and is met by a hail of gunfire. He steps over the lifeless and into the central corridor where the horror of what is about to happen dawns on fleeing worshipers. But they can’t outrun bullets and soon they to lie still.
At the end of the corridor he reaches the open prayer rooms, spacious rooms without furniture or anything else that might provide cover. He opens fire on people huddled together at each end of the room. There is no escape. One man attempts to tackle the gunman but is executed before he can disarm his assailant.
The man doing the shooting reloads. Then fires into piles of bodies that are largely still. He watches for any movement and fires purposefully wherever he sees it. Its reminiscent of the video games he used to play. More bullets are pumped into the bodies. Movements and twitches are few and far between. No one gets out alive. No one, except for him. All the while the music plays and his audience watch.
Minutes later, he calmly walks out of the mosque and having killed almost fifty people. He means to do more killing. Less than an hour later he is apprehended by police. His brief reign of terror has come to an end.
The perpetrator was a 28 year old man named Brenton Tarrant. Unlike most shooters, he did not turn the gun on himself nor did police shoot him. His mission had been a success, he had decimated the Muslim community at Al Noor Mosque and he had uploaded the horror to a media platform that enabled his actions to be seen by people all around the world.
I would see the video, a friend sent it to me and I opened it without looking at it properly. In the first few seconds it was not apparent what I was watching but then the shock and horror took over. I should have switched it off but something compelled me to watch. At the end of it I felt horrified and angry, really angry that this had happened. For Tarrant, I wished only death.
This lone wolf, with his hard right ideology of hatred towards Islam and its followers had shocked the world with his merciless killing and had shaken the fabric of the country he’d attacked. But all lone wolves are born into packs, from which they are eventually rejected. Tarrant’s ideological beliefs had taken him away from his pack, into a new realm of online propaganda and social media messaging through which he promoted his beliefs.
So what do we do with him, this lone wolf? Do we put him down? Do we imprison him and try to deradicalise him? Do we try and rehabilitate him? Learn from him. My instinct has always been to preserve life given we don’t know what has shaped and moulded such people. But as I watched the meticulous and methodical manner in which he vanquished life, I found myself unable to argue with those calling for the death penalty. The remainder of his life would be spent behind bars and even if deradicalised he would wake up every day to the horror of what he did. Maybe ending his life is the most humane thing to do?
A Muslim leader declared New Zealand is broken hearted but not broken. In the midst of this most hateful of crimes, the character of a great country has been evident. Led by prime minister Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand has pulled together. The images of her comforting the victims’ families dressed in the hijab or headscarf worn by Muslim women were powerful, compassionate and unifying. She immediately set about reforming the country’s gun laws in the aftermath of the shooting, in an effort to provide security for the country and in doing so providing an example to rest the rest of the world on the thorny issue of gun control. Perhaps other world leaders should take note.
In the wake of disaster and horror our better nature repeatedly comes to the fore. Whilst no amount of unity and solidarity can take away the horror of Christchurch, New Zealand continues to demonstrate how society can endure if there is compassion and empathy.
But our world is a complex web of ideologies that coexist in opposition. Maintaining harmonious relations with one another is a problem humans have struggled with since we emerged as a species. From these struggles lone wolves emerge and we’ve yet to reintegrate them into our pack.