The man accused of murdering 49 people worshiping at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, reportedly chose his weapons carefully. He didn’t settle on five firearms because he thought they’d cause maximum damage, however — he allegedly used guns in an attempt to provoke a race war by sowing further division in the United States.
“There were five guns used by the primary perpetrator,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reported at a Saturday morning press conference in Wellington. “There were two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns,” she said. “A lever-action firearm was also found.”
Brenton Tarrant, a suspect in the shooting, obtained a gun license in November 2017.
In a 74-page manifesto posted to social media, the author said he could have chosen any means to carry out his attack, but chose firearms to gain media coverage and deepen existing divisions in the U.S. and therefore across the world.
The shooter livestreamed his attack on social media, and he appeared to have two car bombs in the back of his vehicle. But he allegedly made a deliberate choice to use guns to murder as many Muslims as he could during Friday prayers, explaining his rationale in two different sections of his manifesto.
The manifesto seems deliberately written to shock and outrage and is rife with cultural references to the online sites and communities the author reportedly spent time engaging with, so much so it can be difficult to tell which parts are sincere.
In it, the author claimed he wanted his use of guns to create conflict in the U.S. over gun control and the Second Amendment, deepening geographic, political, cultural, and racial fault lines that would lead to a civil war, setting up a worldwide conflict over race and reduce U.S. influence globally while ensuring the future of whites in North America.
The suspect also posted pictures of some of the weapons two days before he allegedly used them in the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand’s history. The markings on those guns — he wrote names and dates in white letters referring to previous clashes involving Muslims — matched those of the weapons he is seen using in the video he made.
Jon Stokes, an Ars Technica founder and journalist who’s written extensively on guns, believes that the shooter even chose a specific firearm model for his alleged murders to inflame the gun control debate.
“In NZ, you can get legally many flavors of AR-15, but you need a special license for what our some here would call ‘assault weapons,’ i.e. semi-autos with military-style features,” Stokes wrote on Twitter. He pointed to the stock and grip, concluding that “the gun in this shot is designed to work around those bans.”
Stokes correctly predicted that the shooter bought his guns legally. “The killer wasn’t known to authorities, so probably he could’ve gotten an AR that isn’t dorked up w/ work-arounds. I don’t think he wanted one, though,” he wrote. “The point of using using a ‘not-an-assault-weapon’ rifle in this rampage is to show that these gun laws are dumb, cosmetic, & do nothing to keep anyone safe. The AR-15 is a modular, open-source weapons platform, & you can’t ban it without banning all semi-auto guns.”
He concluded: “The form of the gun here — fixed stock, technically not-a-pistol-grip — sends a message: ‘I complied with your feature ban, & it didn’t stop me from doing this. Bring on the civil-war-starting mega-ban.’”
At the Saturday press conference, Prime Minister Ardern declared, “I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change.”
In the United States, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., took to Twitter to attack gun lobby group the National Rifle Association after the Christchurch massacre.
“What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?” she wrote, adding, “’Thoughts and prayers’ is reference to the NRA’s phrase used to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies.”
