The Christchurch shooter fits the profile of most mass shooters: white and male

On Friday, March 15, a 28-year-old white Australian man, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, stormed both the Al Noor mosque and Linwood mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Over the course of 36 minutes, the man murdered at least fifty people, many of them women, at both mosques.

Hosne Ara Parvin, 42, who migrated from Bangladesh in 1994, died while shielding her wheelchair-bound husband from the gunfire, according to an account published by Al Jazeera. Her husband survived.

Linda Armstrong, 65, was raised in New Zealand and converted to Islam in her 50s. She quickly built close ties with the Muslim community in Christchurch. "She would come back telling the stories of sharing amazing food and swapping stories with the other women at mosque,” a family member of Armstrong’s told the New Zealand Herald

Ansi Alibava, 24, moved to New Zealand from India in 2018 to complete a master’s degree in agribusiness management. She had recently gotten married and was attending the Friday service with her husband, Abdul Nazer, who survived the attack. After running to a nearby house to call for help, Nazer returned to the mosque and found Alibava’s body lying face down in the street. "She had so many dreams," he told CNN. "No one would expect something like this would happen.” 

Salwa Tsay escaped the Syrian civil war only to lose her husband and son in Friday’s attack, according to USA Today. The family has relatives in the United States, which is where they had originally intended to migrate before Trump’s Muslim ban made doing so impossible.

This attack, like almost all mass shootings, was perpetrated by a man. This man was white, as are the majority of men responsible for mass shootings. There is not yet any indication that the Christchurch shooter had a history of domestic violence or a personal connection to anyone he killed, but that is unusual for these kinds of attacks. In 2015, the Huffington Post found that in 57 percent of mass-shootings – as defined by shootings in which at least four people were killed with a gun – the shooter “targeted either a family member or an intimate partner.” As HuffPost reporter Melissa Jeltsen wrote, “Mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction of gun deaths each year, but it’s clear who overwhelmingly pays the price: Women and children.”

Research conducted in Europe and across the Global North has also consistently indicated that the primary perpetrators of Islamophobic discrimination and violence are white men and that women are the primary victims of such attacks. As Sidrah Maysoon Ahmad, who has studied the relationship between gender and anti-Muslim attacks, told the Village Voice in 2018, “A lot of people would be on board with seeing Islamophobic violence as racist violence. We aren’t there yet to really understand it as gender-based violence.”

On Monday, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that her cabinet had agreed to implement stricter gun control laws, although the exact details of any legislative changes have yet to be announced. The attacks "exposed a range of weaknesses in New Zealand's gun laws," Ardern said. "The clear lesson from history around the world is that to make our community safer the time to act is now."