New Zealand’s 9/11?

15/3/19.

As of now, 49 people lost their lives in the Christchurch shootings yesterday. The population of NZ is a bit under 5 million.

The population of the US in 2001 was about 285 million, and 2,996 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks (including the attackers).

In per-capita terms, expressing these tragedies only as a percentage of national population murdered by terrorists, the two events end up looking almost identical. How can New Zealand not be changed by this?

9/11 changed — is still changing — America, and because America takes up so much space in the world, those changes spilled out into the whole of human history. Events in NZ cast smaller ripples onto the world’s ocean of consciousness, but New Zealanders surely live in a darker place after 15/3 than before.