Anna Burke-Pohiva, 7, reads messages left by well-wishers outside the mosque on Vermont Rd in Ponsonby. Photo/File.
We all possess a deadly weapon — our brain.
A brain does not need guns to cause mayhem if it snaps or is driven to madness. Banning gun ownership and censorship of what we can share on social media is not the solution.
Telling us that we face 14 years
in jail for sharing a genuine news item is clearly out of proportion to the situations where most people might do this.
We should not be intimidated or frightened into surrendering yet more of our rights to a war on terror in which we have little say. Critical thinking and statistics tell us that we have little to fear from the direct effects of terrorism. There is a difference between sensible precaution and fear-driven acceptance of censorship and other loss of hard-won rights.
We should all be aware that after we gave up many of our freedoms and rights after 9/11 that all the problems this was supposed to solve got worse. Let's not make the same mistake here. Perhaps we have more to fear from yet more mistakes by our politicians than we do from the appalling actions of a rare individual whose brain we don't yet understand.
