In memory of the victims of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, and recent gun violence victims in Atlanta, Georgia, read an excerpt from From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter by Seamus McGraw, out April 2021.
Chapter 4
“'Tis Not Alone My Inky Cloak”
And he knew it.
You could tell that by the easy way his right hand—in those fingerless gloves that are so often a part of the costume—skimmed around the edge of the steering wheel of his aging, car-lot Subaru. There was no tension in his hand as he drove, confidently, but carefully, down the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand. He didn’t speed. He obeyed every traffic signal. Wouldn’t want a ticket. He even pulled over for a moment—as any responsible motorist would—before turning his camera around to take a selfie. He struck a pose, mixing just the right measures of Mad Max menace and faux military bearing, as if he’d practiced it in the mirror. It’s just the sort of thing that a narcissistic, unemployed, friendless gym rat would do, second nature for someone who spent hours almost every day obsessively humping four-hundred-pound weights to flog his body into something more than it really was. And then, taking care to signal, he eased back into the light Friday afternoon traffic.
He had been humming along to the cheery strains of an up-tempo folk song from Serbia, first recorded in 1993. It’s not at all clear that he understood a word of the language, but he certainly understood the gist of the song. It was a sickly sweet tribute to Serbian strongman and convicted war criminal Radova Karadzic, a paean to ethnic cleansing and genocidal mass murder accompanied by the merry trilling of a concertina. “Beware the Ustasha and the Turk,” the song goes.
He wouldn’t be the first to appropriate the mien of the ultranationalist Serbs to cloak his murderous urges.
Some five years earlier, a scrawny young man from Pennsylvania had proudly posed for a picture sporting the combat uniform of the Drina Wolves, a unit of the Serbian Army that massacred 7,500 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.1 Not long after the photo was taken, that imaginary soldier skulked into the woods across the road from a remote state police substation and under cover of darkness opened fire, gunning down two troopers at shift change, killing one and critically wounding the other. Neither one of them was an Ustasha or a Turk. And three years before that, a thirty-two-year-old Internet troll had also wrapped himself in the bloody flag of Serb nationalism, and he still fancied himself some kind of “knight” when he was convicted of murdering seventy-seven people—most of them children, and most of them looking much like him—in a bombing and a sneak attack on an island camp in Norway. In a pretentious, rambling, self-referential 1,500-page manifesto, that killer uses the word “Serb” 341 times. It was eclipsed only by his use of the words “America” or the “United States”—in case there’s any question about his other source of inspiration—which appear in one form or another 726 times, by my own counting.
That killer in Norway had become a hero to the young man in Christchurch. He would even claim he had spoken to that killer. And before he climbed into his rattletrap Subaru that afternoon, the aspiring killer in Christchurch had mailed his own seventy-four-page imitation of that manifesto to, among others, the prime minister of New Zealand. It was shot through with sarcasm and adolescent asides. It railed against indolent immigrants from elsewhere, though the aspiring killer in the Subaru was himself an immigrant from Australia who’d quit his job back home as a personal trainer and squandered the small inheritance his father left him after his suicide on a jaunt through Eastern Europe, among other places. In his imitation screed he tries to figuratively dress himself in the grandiose armor of mythic characters of the ancient past, leaders who fought against invaders from Turkey hundreds of years ago and whose exploits have been exploited ever since by tiny men to justify great atrocities against Muslims in that corner of Europe, in places like Srebrenica. It doesn’t fit this killer well. It doesn’t fit any of them well. They all look small and ridiculous.
The song was over by the time he eased his hatchback into the parking lot of the Al Noor Mosque. Now his tinny speakers struggled to hold a bravely chipper martial air more fitting to his Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry: a fife-and-drum song, “The British Grenadiers,” a toy soldier of a tune that conjures gauzy images of lost empires for those who indulge themselves in such nostalgic fantasies.
The lot was crowded, but he quickly found a space, and of course, even though the spot was perfectly flat, he remembered to engage the emergency brake.
One can’t be too careful.
There was no urgency, no sense of alarm as he casually wrapped his hand around the receiver of a black semiautomatic rifle he had kept on the passenger seat in plain view. It was one of those weapons that Adam Lankford tells us are so often fetishized by these killers, engineered to kill efficiently and designed and marketed to appeal to some soldier-of-fortune fantasy.
Of course it was.
The killer had decorated it, if you can call it that, with white supremacist symbols and the dates of great battles between the West and Islam more than half a millennium ago. In sloppy white paint he had scrawled the names of those ancient generals in that fight, along with the name of a more recent victim of a terrorist attack in Stockholm. It was as if he was shamelessly pilfering her pain and pirating their exploits for his own self-aggrandizement.
He eased out of the driver’s seat and ambled to the back of the car. With his free hand he opened the hatch to expose, again in plain sight, two crudely fashioned improvised explosive devices, another semiautomatic rifle (similar in many respects to the one already in his hand), and a shotgun, also black and also covered with slogans scrawled in a childish hand in white paint. He chose the shotgun and sauntered off at a steady, but not in any way frantic, pace toward the front door of the mosque.
He didn’t even bother to close the hatchback.
He didn’t need to.
He had nothing to fear. And he knew it.
What followed over the next six minutes and thirty-nine seconds was a wholesale atrocity as horrible as any ever committed, anywhere; as vicious as the mass murder of children at West Nickel Mines and Sandy Hook, as murderously theatrical as the massacre of theater goers in Aurora, Colorado, by a killer who had adopted the visage of a cartoon villain.
We know every heartbeat of this part of the mass murder because in an act of supreme narcissism, the kind of narcissism at the heart of many mass shooters, the killer had live-streamed every second of it from the moment he first climbed into his Subaru.
The killing began when he was greeted at the door by a young worshipper who apparently didn’t recognize the menace in the costume the intruder was wearing—the black tunic, the off-the-rack tactical vest—or who didn’t see the garishly decorated killing machines in his hands, one of them fitted with a strobe light to blind and disorient the worshippers.
The young man welcomed the stranger, calling him “brother.”
The killer murdered him where he stood.
It ended—or this part of the attack did, anyway—minutes later as he sauntered back to his car, past a young woman who, wounded, made it as far as the street. “Help me!” she cried as she lay facedown in the gutter. “Help me!” He stepped to the curb and fatally shot her. In the back.
In between, while firing at up to three rounds per second, he killed forty-two innocent, unarmed people, most of them as they huddled together in corners of the mosque.
At one point during the attack, a young man, a head shorter and a stone lighter than the killer, jostled him. Perhaps, as the young man’s family later said, he was indeed making a heroic attempt to grab the murderer’s gun. Or maybe it was an accident. The video evidence is unclear. In any case, the young man bumped into him with no more force than might be expended by a retiree who elbows you while reaching for the second-to-last Christmas turkey in the frozen food section of Pak’nSave. It is clear that the killer was certain that he had nothing to fear.
The killer shot the young man from an arm’s length away. The young man died soon afterward. For the remaining minutes he spent inside the mosque, the killer faced no other resistance, and he seemed to revel in that, to bask in it.
That killer in Norway had become a hero to the young man in Christchurch. He would even claim he had spoken to that killer. And before he climbed into his rattletrap Subaru that afternoon, the aspiring killer in Christchurch had mailed his own seventy-four-page imitation of that manifesto to, among others, the prime minister of New Zealand. It was shot through with sarcasm and adolescent asides. It railed against indolent immigrants from elsewhere, though the aspiring killer in the Subaru was himself an immigrant from Australia who’d quit his job back home as a personal trainer and squandered the small inheritance his father left him after his suicide on a jaunt through Eastern Europe, among other places. In his imitation screed he tries to figuratively dress himself in the grandiose armor of mythic characters of the ancient past, leaders who fought against invaders from Turkey hundreds of years ago and whose exploits have been exploited ever since by tiny men to justify great atrocities against Muslims in that corner of Europe, in places like Srebrenica. It doesn’t fit this killer well. It doesn’t fit any of them well. They all look small and ridiculous.
The song was over by the time he eased his hatchback into the parking lot of the Al Noor Mosque. Now his tinny speakers struggled to hold a bravely chipper martial air more fitting to his Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry: a fife-and-drum song, “The British Grenadiers,” a toy soldier of a tune that conjures gauzy images of lost empires for those who indulge themselves in such nostalgic fantasies.
The lot was crowded, but he quickly found a space, and of course, even though the spot was perfectly flat, he remembered to engage the emergency brake.
One can’t be too careful.
There was no urgency, no sense of alarm as he casually wrapped his hand around the receiver of a black semiautomatic rifle he had kept on the passenger seat in plain view. It was one of those weapons that Adam Lankford tells us are so often fetishized by these killers, engineered to kill efficiently and designed and marketed to appeal to some soldier-of-fortune fantasy.
Of course it was.
The killer had decorated it, if you can call it that, with white supremacist symbols and the dates of great battles between the West and Islam more than half a millennium ago. In sloppy white paint he had scrawled the names of those ancient generals in that fight, along with the name of a more recent victim of a terrorist attack in Stockholm. It was as if he was shamelessly pilfering her pain and pirating their exploits for his own self-aggrandizement.
He eased out of the driver’s seat and ambled to the back of the car. With his free hand he opened the hatch to expose, again in plain sight, two crudely fashioned improvised explosive devices, another semiautomatic rifle (similar in many respects to the one already in his hand), and a shotgun, also black and also covered with slogans scrawled in a childish hand in white paint. He chose the shotgun and sauntered off at a steady, but not in any way frantic, pace toward the front door of the mosque.
He didn’t even bother to close the hatchback.
He didn’t need to.
He had nothing to fear. And he knew it.
What followed over the next six minutes and thirty-nine seconds was a wholesale atrocity as horrible as any ever committed, anywhere; as vicious as the mass murder of children at West Nickel Mines and Sandy Hook, as murderously theatrical as the massacre of theater goers in Aurora, Colorado, by a killer who had adopted the visage of a cartoon villain.
We know every heartbeat of this part of the mass murder because in an act of supreme narcissism, the kind of narcissism at the heart of many mass shooters, the killer had live-streamed every second of it from the moment he first climbed into his Subaru.
The killing began when he was greeted at the door by a young worshipper who apparently didn’t recognize the menace in the costume the intruder was wearing—the black tunic, the off-the-rack tactical vest—or who didn’t see the garishly decorated killing machines in his hands, one of them fitted with a strobe light to blind and disorient the worshippers.
The young man welcomed the stranger, calling him “brother.”
The killer murdered him where he stood.
It ended—or this part of the attack did, anyway—minutes later as he sauntered back to his car, past a young woman who, wounded, made it as far as the street. “Help me!” she cried as she lay facedown in the gutter. “Help me!” He stepped to the curb and fatally shot her. In the back.
In between, while firing at up to three rounds per second, he killed forty-two innocent, unarmed people, most of them as they huddled together in corners of the mosque.
At one point during the attack, a young man, a head shorter and a stone lighter than the killer, jostled him. Perhaps, as the young man’s family later said, he was indeed making a heroic attempt to grab the murderer’s gun. Or maybe it was an accident. The video evidence is unclear. In any case, the young man bumped into him with no more force than might be expended by a retiree who elbows you while reaching for the second-to-last Christmas turkey in the frozen food section of Pak’nSave. It is clear that the killer was certain that he had nothing to fear.
The killer shot the young man from an arm’s length away. The young man died soon afterward. For the remaining minutes he spent inside the mosque, the killer faced no other resistance, and he seemed to revel in that, to bask in it.
