the NRA has been putting pressure on our Australian government to loosen gun laws. Anyone who doubts the success of outlawing guns only has to look at the statistics. I feel much safer knowing they're illegal. Doesn't stop the real criminals but it does stop impulse shootings, accidents and the crazies. '

I love NZ and my kiwi mates and am so so sorry that it had to be an Aussie that did this terrible deed. New Zealand, a country of peace, did not deserve this.

Trying to seize the guns of all law abiding citizens just because of one mad shooter was utterly insane and a typical knee jerk reaction of the liberal gun control nuts.

If you want to stop it, you have to understand the mechanism behind it all.

The reason right-wing extremists want to kill all Buddhists is that they're scared of them. They see the vicious hate that Buddhists propagate (e.g. "bless the jewel in the lotus" ) and they feel so threatened by this that they want to take up arms against them. If you have primary hate against others in your holy texts, people will fear that you will act on that hate, and some of them will seek to carry out pre-emptive strikes against you out of self defence. They hate you (secondary hate) because of your hate (primary hate). Of course, they would need to be completely bonkers to regard "bless the jewel in the lotus" as hateful, and the result is that they don't. We don't see right-wing extremists going after Buddhists.

But what if there was real hate in the holy texts of a religion, such as calls to commit acts of genocide against devil-worshiping Yazidis? What if the texts contained copious demonisation and dehuanisation of people who don't follow that religion, thereby setting up the faithful to regard them as vermin, not covered by any commands not to kill innocent people? This is the exact mechanism that Hitler used to program a population to wipe out Jews without feeling anything for them at all, but he took that mechanism straight from religion where he had seen it in action. Many of his ideas came from the genocide of one to two million Christian Armenians killed in Turkey in the '30s. People who deny the Holocaust are rightly regarded as vile, but it is considered hateful to criticise the people behind other genocides if they are driven by religion, and genocide denial in that context is regarded as just fine. This is double standards (aka hypocrisy). The reality is that we have atrocities like the one in New Zealand precisely because people who follow a religion filled with vicious poison are causing other people to live in great fear of them, and that fuels the right-wing extremists who feel the need to go to the lengths they do because they perceive that the rest of society is failing to defend civilisation from the threat. This is the actual mechanism behind the violence and it would be a big step forward if people understood it, because then we might be able to stop all the killings happening instead of setting ourselves up to suffer ever more of them.

The sad reality is that those who unthinkingly endorse the primary hate in the holy texts of their religion by buying into that religion (and unwittingly propagating its primary hate) are causing others to fear them, so they are generating secondary hate against themselves: they can end up becoming victims of their own hate (which they don't even realise they have). The ideal way forward would be to reform all such religions by stripping all the primary hate out of them so that they no longer generate alarm. If people aren't prepared to do that though, their religions should be banned outright in the same way we ban the extreme right-wing organisations which appear as a reaction to them. This should also be done with all religions and all other ideologies which contain primary hate in their manifestos - that kind of hate is not compatible with a peaceful world, and tolerating it leads to conflict. Mixing more and more bigots together is setting things up for future genocidal conflicts like the ones we've already seen in India and Bosnia. We clearly haven't learned from history though: no amount of chanting "love not hate" or "hope not fear" can defuse the bomb that society is carelessly building, because it only takes one spark to trigger friends to kill friends and neighbours to kill neighbours, which is something we've seen happen before. It is a reckless project which may lead to billions dying in a massive conflict in the future when the bomb is ignited. Right-wing terrorists aren't helping to prevent this, of course, because all they do is make the general population more strongly minded to go on mixing more and more bigots together and fooling themselves into thinking it's the right thing to do, and the result is that we're actually setting up more people to be killed. The bigots in question don't see themselves as bigots, of course, but they have failed to condemn the most awful primary hate in their own holy texts, and they are mystified as to why devout people on their side keep turning into terrorists who seek to act on that primary hate in an attempt to do their religion by the book.

There are no people deserving of hate involved in any of this. They are all victims of primary hate in texts that are admired by people but which should be condemned. That primary hate is the enemy, and it will just go on generating violence from both sides so long as people go on tolerating it. People are not the enemy here - they all need to be rescued from the hate which has been fed into them, and they need to be helped to do so. It needs to be made clear to them that their holy hate is not acceptable, and if they really think their God is good, they should feel the need to strip all that hate out of the holy texts on the basis that it cannot have come from him. If this was done, we would end up with a peaceful world where all religions are benign and where no one lives in fear of them. No more terrorists.

I do not like religions but do not advocate killing people I prefer education logic and common sense.

Everyone deserves to feel safe. The Christchurch shootings are pure insanity and one way to stop it or at least limit it greatly would never be approved by the world at large. What if those who did such shootings were simply lined up and shot in the same way? No glorying or big speeches involved on either side, just a statement that we condemn mass murder and those who commit it.