The Aramoana massacre was a mass murder that occurred on 13 November 1990 in the small seaside township of Aramoana, New Zealand. Resident David Gray, a 33-year-old unemployed man, began indiscriminately shooting people in the township with a scoped semi-automatic rifle, after a verbal dispute with his next-door neighbour. He shot neighbours and a family visiting the township, and killed thirteen people, including local police Sergeant Stewart Guthrie, first responder to the reports of a shooting. After a careful house-by-house search the next day, police officers led by the Special Tactics Group located Gray and shot him dead as he came out of a house firing from the hip (media reports at the time called the group by the pre-1990 name, the Anti Terrorist Squad). It is the deadliest criminal shooting in New Zealand history.
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Famous quotes containing the word massacre:
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)