This is Now
“I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.” That was New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shortly after massacres at two Christchurch mosques. On Monday, she said the government plans to have new laws on the books by next week. “Within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism, we will have announced reforms which will, I believe, make our community safer.” (It turns out now is exactly the time to talk about gun laws.)
+ “Until today I was one of the New Zealanders who owned a semi-automatic rifle. On the farm they are a useful tool in some circumstances, but my convenience doesn’t outweigh the risk of misuse.” Kiwis begin to voluntarily return their semi-automatic rifles.
+ Congregants from The Tree of Life in Pittsburgh are raising money for New Zealand’s grieving Muslim community. “‘Sam Schachner, president of the congregation whose Tree of Life building was the site of a shooting massacre that left 11 worshippers dead, said, ‘We’re unfortunately part of a club that nobody wants to be a part of, and we wanted to reach out to New Zealand in the same way everyone reached out to us.'” (Every day there are signs of hate, bigotry, and violence. But there are also signs of unity, resilience, and hope.) Donate here.
+ “The New Zealand killer did not exact his violence in America, but he would be at home in our statistics: in the past decade, seventy-three per cent of all American extremist-related killings have come from the right wing … Pointing out those patterns does not feed oxygen to the sources; it subjects them to the disinfecting power of sunlight. We can only have an honest analysis of the sources of this violence if we understand how it grows and spreads.” Evan Osnos in The New Yorker: How to Talk About the New Zealand Massacre: More Sunlight, Less Oxygen.
+ And here’s a look at how technology was used to spread video of the attack, even as the people who run the platforms tried to stop the deluge. From WaPo: Inside YouTube’s struggles to shut down video of the New Zealand shooting — and the humans who outsmarted its systems. And from Reuters: Facebook says it removed 1.5 million videos of the New Zealand mosque attack.