Mosque tragedy made us stronger

The guilty plea by the Christchurch mosque murderer leaves us with many unanswered questions.

Some of those will have to be answered by the authorities – like how did he come to accumulate so many high-powered military-style weapons with seemingly so few people here to vouch for him, and – even if in hindsight – obvious links to others spouting a hateful ideology.

As for the rest of those questions – such as how the shooter came to be radicalised – we must accept they may never be answered.

What we do know is that he had a perfectly ordinary childhood in his home country, Australia, though he was something of a misfit.

His father died young, and while that was no doubt a personal tragedy for the young man, it doesn’t explain the monster he became. If anything, it left him in the relatively privileged position of inheriting money with which to indulge his fantasies.

He is said to have become radicalised while travelling overseas but there’s no particular reason why that affected him, yet none of the countless others who travelled the same roads before him.

But what else is there to know anyway? He is a coward and a nobody who saw the act of gunning down 51 innocent men, women and children at peaceful prayer as a way to make his star shine bright on the international stage.

We can assume that of all the reasons for his surprise change of plea to guilty, sparing the victims and their families the trauma of a drawnout trial was not among them.

But for the victims at least there will be relief that finally justice has been done. The uncertainty of the gunman’s trial would have taken its emotional toll.

We can all be thankful, meanwhile, that he is denied the platform of a court trial to spread his hate-filled ideology. Beyond that, he no longer merits our attention or our thoughts; we have nothing left to learn from him.

We should focus, instead, on the lessons we took from March 15 about ourselves as a nation, especially now, when we need each other more than ever.

The violence of the mosque murders sparked an outpouring of love and community and compassion, and drew us together in the same way as other acts of unimaginable tragedy, like the Christchurch earthquakes.

These are the qualities we have seen time and again in a decade book-ended by tears – earthquakes, Pike River, Whakaari/White Island, and the mosque shootings; we have learnt that adversity draws us closer together, rather than tears us apart. It’s what gives us our sense of nationhood.

We had all hoped that, after so much darkness, the next decade would be brighter. Yet the coming weeks and months look like being even harder on us still. But after so much tragedy, we know ourselves better than ever – and we know that we have the strength and the resilience to get through this.

For the victims at least there will be relief that finally justice has been done. The uncertainty of the

gunman’s trial would have taken its emotional toll.