In the period between January 2004 and March 2019, 1068 people in New Zealand were the victims of homicide (Fyers & Ensor, 2019). The most recent available data show that the rate of gun deaths in New Zealand is approximately 1.2 deaths per 100,000 population per year: slightly higher than that in Australia at 1 death per 100,000 per year, and an order of magnitude lower than that in the United States at 11 deaths per 100,000 population per year (Sydney School of Public Health, 2019). For example, there has only ever been one fatal shooting at a school, and that took place almost 100 years ago, in 1923. Although gun ownership in New Zealand has been increasing, with an estimated 62% rise in the number of guns in the country since 2008 (Sydney School of Public Health, 2019), gun violence itself is rare. This compares to 15 firearms per 100 people in Australia and more than 120 firearms per 100 people in the United States of America (Sydney School of Public Health, 2019). According to the Small Arms Survey (Karp, 2017), New Zealand has the 17th highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, with an estimated 1.2 million firearms distributed over a population of under 5 million people, or 26 firearms per 100 persons. New Zealand is a country with a high number of guns, but comparatively low rates of gun violence. Guns are common but gun violence has been rare in New Zealand
The shooting also raised the intractable problem of the internet allowing terrorists to promulgate violent content and extremist ideology with regulation in this area harder to achieve than gun control. We present this as a national case study, considering psychological and societal enablers for legislative reform in response to extreme gun violence. Within weeks, new gun control laws were introduced with bipartisan support. This was strongly modeled by political leaders. The unprecedented reluctance by the New Zealand media to feature the shooter as a protagonist or even publish his name, concentrating instead on victims and societal issues, helped promote a sense of collective responsibility for change. Psychologically, this served as a focusing event with high threat salience, shocking a country unused to gun violence despite its comparatively lax firearm legislation. In March 2019, a mass shooting at two Christchurch mosques, livestreamed to Facebook, resulted in the deaths of 51 people.
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