#ChristchurchMosqueShootings

This post is a personal reflection on the recent events in Christchurch. Many people have proposed different responses making some very good points. Here are my thoughts:

1. Racism and bigotry has never been solved by wagging fingers at bigots. It has been solved by empowering the targets and systematically calling out minor acts of racism and bigotry so it becomes de-normalised. There have been lots of great suggestions as to how to empowering the targets in the last couple of days; listen to the targets on how they need to be empowered, not a white guy like me.
2. Enact a law that permanently raises the New Zealand refugee quota automatically in response to anti-immigrant hate crimes (starting with the Christchurch incident). This explicitly and clearly makes anti-immigrant hate crimes’ primary motivation self-defeating. Doubling our quote also raises it in line with international norms.
3. Ban the commercial trading of firearms, moving their import to the not-for-profit sector (i.e. gun clubs) or to a personal activity. This removes the incentives behind the current Gun City advertisements and tempers commercial incentives for importing guns.
4. Introduce a systematic buy-back program for weapons (guns, replica swords, etc).
5. Make owning a gun an inconvenience, doubly so in urban areas. This likely involves significantly tightening the licencing requirements (restricting types of guns, requiring advanced first aid and similar courses, etc) and random checks on licensees’ secure lockup measures, etc. It may also involve requiring licensees to report shooting trips, shooting range visits, etc, etc. Done right, this may even have the side-effect of improving our conservation efforts by getting a better idea of who’s shooting what introduced and native animals
6. Gun range licenses should be managed in a similar way to alcohol licenses, with renewals, public notifications etc.
7. Update the rules around legal deposit so that when organisations and publishers selectively remove or update content from their websites they are required to notify the National Library and that National Library can broadcast this taken-down content. This attempts to preserve the public record by amplifying the Streisand effect; efforts by public figures to sanitise their pasts without public apology need to be resisted.
8. If we’re orchestrating large-scale take-downs of offensive New Zealand content (such as videos of shooters shooting people) from the web, we need to reconcile this with certain statutory duties, such as the requirement that the National Library collect and archive New Zealand web content. Collecting and archiving such offensive material may sound bizarre, but not doing so leaves us open to the kinds of revisionism that appears to fuel this kind of behaviour.
9. If we’re going to continue to have religious education / schooling, it needs to address issues of religious hate rather than being a covert recruitment operation as it appears to be at the moment.
10. We need to ask ourselves whether some of our brands (particularly sports brands) need to change their branding. The most effective way is probably the Christchurch City Council drafting a bylaw saying that local sports people and teams using it’s facilities must be named after animals with no negative connotations, with a limited 10 year exception for existing teams to meet their contractual obligations. Other councils would soon follow and giving a realistic time frame for renaming allows for planning around merchandising, team apparel and so forth.
11. Have an explicit fund for public actors (museums, galleries, libraries, academics, tohunga, imams, etc) to generate ‘content’ (everything from peer review papers to museum experiences, from school teaching resources to Te Ara articles, from poetry competitions to murals) on some of the deeper issues here. There’s a great need for young and old to engage with these issues, now and in the decades to come.
12. Find ways to amplify minority / oppressed voices. In theory blogs and social media were meant to be a way that we could find and the media pick up on theses voices in times like these, but across many media outlets this is manifestly not happening. We’re seeing straight white males write that New Zealand has no discrimination problems and editors sending those pieces to print. We’re seeing ‘but he was such a nice young man’ stories. It’s no coincidence that the media outlets and pundits that are doing this are largely the same ones who have previously be accused of racism. We need to find ways to fix this, if necessary leveraging advertisers and/or adding conditions to spectrum licenses.
13. We need to seriously reflect on whether an apology is needed in relation to the 2007 New Zealand police raids, which now stand in a new light.

The law of unintended consequences means that there will be side effects. The most obvious two from this list may be increased barriers to recreational gun clubs (including Olympic pistol shooting, which is pretty hard to argue isn’t a genuine sport, but which has never really been all that big in New Zealand) and the decreased amateur shooting of pest species (deer, pig, etc) on public conservation land (which is a more serious issue).