In Aramoana, New Zealand, David Gray shoots dead 13 people in a massacre before being tracked down and killed by police the next day.
The Aramoana massacre was a spree shooting that occurred on 13 November 1990 in the small seaside township of Aramoana, northeast of Dunedin, New Zealand. Resident David Gray killed 13 people including local police Sergeant Stewart Guthrie, one of the first responders to the reports of a shooting, after a verbal dispute between Gray and his next-door neighbour. After a careful house-to-house search the next day, police officers led by the Anti-Terrorist Squad (now known as the Special Tactics Group) located Gray, and shot and injured him as he came out of a house firing from the hip. He died in an ambulance while being transported to hospital. Television news carried live reports from the scene.
At the time, the incident was the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand's history, being surpassed 29 years later by the Christchurch mosque shootings. After the shootings, sweeping changes were made to New Zealand's firearms legislation in 1992, including 10-year photographic licences and tight restrictions on military style semi-automatic firearms.
Aramoana is a small coastal settlement 27 kilometres (17 mi) north of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand. The settlement's permanent population in the 2001 Census was 261. Supplementing this are seasonal visitors from the city who occupy cribs. The name Aramoana is Māori for "pathway of the sea".
It was founded by the Otago Harbour Board and established in the 1880s as a pilot station for navigation around the mouth of the Otago Harbour. This area grew into a small farming village. In the 1950s, the town became popular as a beach resort and a rural life village due to the construction of a mole to inhibit the spread of tidal sands into the mouth of Otago Harbour and was surveyed and amalgamated as a suburb of Port Chalmers borough.
It is the site of the Aramoana massacre, New Zealand's second deadliest criminal shooting, on 13 and 14 November 1990.