Last week I wrote a brief blog post about New Zealand’s attempt to criminalize a video taken of the infamous Christchurch mosque shooting, leveling penalties of up to 10 years in prison for possession and 14 years for sharing it. New Zealand, apparently, has a “Chief Censor’s Office” that gets to make decisions about what its residents may and may not see.
Today, the Chief Censor has doubled-down, now banning a document published by the shooter explaining his reasons for killing 50 Muslims as they prayed
The banned manifesto of the shooter, whose name I don’t really care to spread, clearly lays out the motivation behind this act of terrorism. The tl;dr version is that the shooter is a self-admitted racist who believes that non-white immigrants will take over “white countries” because of the combination of unchecked immigration and declining birth rates among white people. In other words, this man is a white supremacist.
There are really two ways to address terrorism: 1) to take away the means, and 2) to address the root cause. New Zealand, as many countries, has decided to go exclusively with the former, banning all semi-automatic weapons in a country where guns were already quite regulated. But terrorists always find a means to accomplish their goals, whether with homemade bombs, speeding trucks, hijacked airplanes, or otherwise.
New Zealand’s approach not only fails to try to remedy underlying causes, but actually prevents its residents from gaining any insight into the same by hiding a primary source that reveals the motivation in detail. At the same time, they place an authoritarian boot on the free speech rights (let alone gun rights) of their people with little benefit as future terrorists accomplish their goals via different means.
We can’t defeat terror by ignoring what motivated the terrorist. Without my personal support for any of the ideas expressed therein, here’s the manifesto (.pdf). Don’t click if you’re in New Zealand — that will be 10 years.
Professional Troublemaker ® 
I’ve read a little about what happened but still don’t know the whole story. This info seems to help me understand the shooter better. I also agree that taking away tools to kill doesn’t work. As I’ve told people before, if I had to pick between a shooter even with a fully automatic rifle or a bomb, I’d take the shooter every time. At least with a shooter, you can have time to react if you are not one of the first ones targeted. With a bomb, it is pretty much instant. You are either close enough to be killed right away, close enough to die from serious injuries or you are far enough away to survive. Thing is, you have no chance to react or run. If the person places more than one bomb, you could actually run from one right into the path of another.
Nice post.
Thanks for this post and for posting the link. A problem that society faces is that some people are too unstable to be exposed to inflammatory communications, but we cannot reduce an entire society of adults to reading only what is suitable for the least stable among us.
We have the same problem with automobiles. It’s certain that giving a driver’s license to any adult who can pass a simple test will lead to intentional vehicular homicide and well as many unnecessary deaths caused by alcohol and recklessness. However, people need their cars.
To be well governed, a society needs to face its worst as well as its best. Banning the shooter’s manifesto will not erase the problems that produced the shooting.
An intriguing read. Understandable. For some reason, I am mad at the Chinese about what they did and are doing to the Tibetian’s, but I don’t feel America is reserved for white people. I do resent technical work in America going to H1B visa holders. The myth that there weren’t enough workers available domestically is laughable. I don’t mind competing with US Citizen’s for the jobs here. Corporate America has sold out the engineers of my generation though. I pray for their karma to come to them so they may evolve.
I agree completely with your perspective.
I think we’re facing an increasing threat to free speech in the US, too, as the sense of entitlement to protecting ones sensibilities also increases – sad .
I got 8 years in prison for actually doing a home invasion with a gun. I guess that wasn’t quite as bad as reading the wrong book in the USSR… I mean New Zealand…
Maybe he’s just a separatist and not a supremacist….