Heather du Plessis-Allan: Should we expect all this violence to be the new normal?

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

We have a young producer working on this show called Jack, who’s recently moved over from London.

He asked us today why we're all so worked up about this one shooting on Ponsonby Road - and why if you open any of the local newspapers' websites today, it’s right there at the top of the front page.
As Jack says, this happens all the time in London, it's no big deal. He even watched a guy get knifed in a park in front of him while he was out having a durry not long before he moved here. He then went back inside to work at the radio station - and the knifing wasn’t even worth putting in the bulletin.
I can answer that question for Jack - the reason we are so worked up about this is because this is still new to us.

We can all remember a time when this kind of thing didn’t happen in nice places like Ponsonby. And it wasn’t that long ago - five years ago, maybe?
But then in the last few years, there was the shooting in Dr Rudi's on the Viaduct in Auckland, and the shooting in the Sofitel lobby in Wynyard Quarter, and there was the guy on the scooter who shot the other guy on Queen Street, and then the guy who took a gun to work and shot his co-workers on the construction site in Auckland CBD.
And it's still rare enough that the significant shootings in Auckland can still be recalled and counted on a hand - but I think we suspect that those, by contrast, innocent days are over.

We now have guys going out for a drink on a Sunday night with a firearm in a Guess manbag draped over their shoulder.
And I think we know why this has happened - because the Australians have deported hundreds, if not thousands of criminals, that are way harder and way more trigger happy than the ones we’ve gotten used to.

And unfortunately for us, they like going to the bars we go to. Nice people go to those bars - and so do these guys with the guns in their manbags. It's a bit freaky, isn’t it?
And the most honest amongst us will admit it’s probably only a matter of years before we have the same reaction as Jack - and don't find it scary or interesting anymore.

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