Gun Violence, Small Town Stability and the Cauterized Wound in Out of the Blue (2006)

America’s all but resigned itself as a nation to being rocked every week or so by new gun massacres. People who’ve seen it as a worse steady decline than ever since Sandy Hook have good reason to feel that way. The supposedly inalienable rights of Americans to bear arms is one of the strangest pieces of any nation’s constitution, yet many angry men and women are convinced they’re going to be the last line of defence as a citizens’ militia when the government comes for them— curiously those same people haven’t taken their assault rifles down to free any immigrant children from cages in the desert, go figure. While it’s smart to not trust the government as far you can throw them, it’s borderline psychopathic to think that, after endless killings with rifles of all sorts, the solution to the problem is to keep frothing at the mouth over the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

The 2006 film Out of the Blue depicts New Zealand’s wake-up call with gun violence. The screenplay examines the day of November 13th, 1990 when 33-year-old David Malcolm Gray (portrayed by Matthew Sunderland) went on a rampage in the township of Aramoana using a semi-automatic rifle and a cache of other weapons, resulting in the murders of thirteen people. Gray’s killing spree lasted almost twenty-four hours before he was shot down by the New Zealand Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) and died in an ambulance before arriving at the hospital. This single event was the catalyst for serious debates about gun violence, which led to changes in the firearms regulations only a couple years later in 1992. Director and co-writer Robert Sarkies uses Out of the Blue to show the devastating personal damage of a rampage like the one Gray commits. His depiction of the massacre is as emotional as it is chilling. Contrasting Gray’s killings with the constant barrage of shootings in America makes the film a powerful analysis of how gun culture has corrupted the U.S. in comparison to a place such as New Zealand. Because there exists no parallel for the U.S.— no single event has affected the country deeply enough that the government has finally said they’ll have no more of their citizens dying bloodily in the schools and streets by the hands of their fellow citizens. Gray’s single-handed massacre occurred in a small town, striking fear in the hearts of everyday people across N.Z. Where on the map do people have to die in America for things to change?

Prior to the massacre, the town of Aramoana is depicted as quaint and close knit. It’s the type of community outside the big urban centres where these types of violent, shocking crimes aren’t the norm. When Gray’s violence erupts, he tears the fabric of the town itself apart, figuratively and literally at once. The rest of the town were going about their normal days and lives. The cops, prior to the incident, were otherwise busy with paperwork, dead sheep in a field, planning weekend barbecues, dealing with loose dogs, making coffee, and all the other mundane minutiae of policing in a tiny town. Here, the community and togetherness of Aramoana is on display. We witness the rest of the town together with friends, family, or even co-workers. In contrast, Gray is an unstable loner who’s isolated himself in a stuffy little house. He has issues with his neighbours, oscillating between being totally enraged by them and scared of them. At the bank, a two-dollar fee sets him off, which sends him back home fuming, and in his deepest isolation a minor argument with a neighbour initiates the fatal explosion of Gray’s rage.

The transition from before to after the shooting starts is stark and grim. The town goes from quaint to terrifying in minutes. Everyone in Aramoana is so unused to gunfire it takes time before David’s physically seen with his rifle and the threat is understood. At first, people assume it’s the backfiring of a car engine. In a big city people might automatically assume the reverse— that it’s gunfire before a bad engine. When people around town are warned of “a man with a gun” they don’t automatically believe it, because gun crime isn’t an issue where they come from, unlike in America where an armed man firing weapons in a public place has sadly become a potential part of everyday life. There are smaller moments included in the screenplay which illustrate how far removed from gun culture and big city crime Aramoana was prior to Gray’s spree. One scene features what Eva Helen Dickson actually experienced that day. She and another resident, Chris Cole, went out towards the road on their street after shots were fired – killing Eva’s son, James – only to be shot at by Gray. Cole was hit while in a phone booth dialing police. Eva, a senior citizen who had recently received a hip replacement, was forced to dive for cover. The scene features Eva crawling to and from her house to try contacting an ambulance for Cole— an act for which Mrs. Dickson would later receive the George Medal for her bravery. It’s the moments in between where we get a sense of the innocence shattered in Aramoana, but also the innocence that somehow remained even in the face of such horrific tragedy, such as when Eva and Cole making regular small talk as he lies by the phone booth bleeding to death.

Out of the Blue’s discussion of gun culture doesn’t solely come from an audience comparing New Zealand’s response in the aftermath of the Aramoana massacre to the dearth of a response in America after countless shootings. The ‘good guy with a gun’ talking point most right-wing lovers of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution trot out is swiftly dealt with in the screenplay, too. Good guys with guns weren’t entirely enough to stop Gray, at least not in a timely manner. The cops in Aramoana, and even N.Z.’s well trained ATS, were generally unprepared for such levels of violence, from a lack of guns on their part to not enough walkies to allow for better communications, all on top of the country societally never having experience such an incident of gun crime before. Not to mention the emotional burden of the first responding police knowing the victims personally and forced to see friends and acquaintances injured or die in front of their eyes.

Ultimately, access to military grade weaponry allowed Gray, a solitary man, to turn a tiny town upside down and terrorise its people. One man with a handgun, no matter how much ammo he has, or a knife, couldn’t manage to cause this level of destruction or emotional terror— in spite of what the National Rifle Association would have you believe. This is precisely why, in the aftermath of Gray’s acts, New Zealand moved to make amendments to its gun laws. In 1992, the laws were tightened: written permits would be required to order guns and ammo by mail, and sale of ammo would be restricted only to those holding a firearm license; in addition, firearms licenses were then required to have a photograph as part of the identification, and any licensed holder had to have appropriate storage for their firearms, which was subject to inspection prior to any license being issued; most important, and controversial to gun fetishists, was the new requirement for all license holders to be re-inspected for a new license every ten years. Shootings haven’t disappeared entirely from New Zealand because of these changes but a massacre in numbers like the one Gray perpetrated hasn’t since occurred anywhere in the country precisely because accessibility to “Rambo-style weapons,” as Minister of Police John Banks described them in 1990, was restricted by the new amendments.

Although the aftermath of the massacre is not depicted in the film, the finale does feature one important image: Gray’s home is burned to the ground while residents watch on. This moment actually happened in Aramoana following the police shooting and capturing Gray. But this real image is actually a metaphor for the way in which Aramoana, and New Zealand as a whole, dealt with such a hideous act of gun crime. The burning of Gray’s home is the cauterising of a wound. New Zealand took action to make sure a massacre like this would never occur again in their country, or at least it would be much more difficult for it to happen. In America, the wound is open and festering constantly. There are no measures taken even to attempt to prevent the near weekly shootings in America. Gray’s home in flames is an image of national catharsis, showing a nation unwilling to allow a monster to live on, in any way, shape, or form. Meanwhile, in America, news media outlets splash the faces of Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, Omar Mateen, James Holmes, Charles Whitman, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold across newspapers and all over the internet. American mass shooters made immortal through the proliferation of their image alone. There are no young women on Tumblr in New Zealand fawning over David Gray and wishing they could marry him. The number of white American girls who want to have sex with Dylann Roof is disturbing. One country, after a single day of appalling violence, chose its people as most sacred. The other, after decades, continually feeds the blood of its children to a document written almost two-hundred-and-fifty years ago by old white men who only had gunpowder and muskets, which doesn’t only show in its love of gun culture but also permeates other aspects of U.S. culture to a worrisome degree.