It's unfortunate that when we go into any depth concerning how people are radicalized, we're not spending time talking about the absolutely senseless cruelty that happened in Christchurch and the many hundreds of lives that were either lost or affected personally. It feels that whenever we start talking about the problems underlying this and other massacres, we're turning it into debate about different ideologies, abstracting an issue that culminated in something real and intense for many people, and putting the talk away from how insanely horrific and deranged it is to do something like this, and how painful and terrible it must be to be related to/friends with someone involved--or one of the dead or injured.
I don't want to spend too much time speculating on what influenced this guy to do it, whether he's a psychopath or not, whether anything could have been done to stop him, and what can be inferred from his case about mass shootings in general (and researched and applied, hopefully, in preventative stuff), particularly as might regard the radicalization process--and I'm not going to speculate because I don't think I actually know any of that. I just wanted to say that this incident, with its massiveness and relationship to internet culture, has really made me think about the ethics of how people share things online. I don't have conclusions yet--I'd like to wait for the research concerning his case to be done and hopefully, in time, published. But I am absolutely re-evaluating how I think reading online media and forum posts can affect a fragile intelligence such as the shooter's. It's all fun and memes until this guy takes it too far.
I don't think talking about what can influence a person to do this is making excuses for the murderer. It's an important topic.