In 2014, there were a series of shootings that occurred in the parliament hill in Ottawa. Corporal Nathan Cirillo, a soldier in Canada, was fatally shot by Zehaf Bibeau while on his ceremonial duty in the Canadian national war memorial. Zehaf Bibeau then entered the parliamentary building where various members of the parliament were holding some caucuses. After fighting with the constable at the entrance, multiple shootouts emerged with the security personnel. He later died in the scene after being shot 31 times by the security personnel in the resident. Before the shootings, Zehaf had made a video showing his interests to kill some soldiers in respect of his religion and about the Canada foreign policy. The killing was the 2nd most serious security breach following the parliamentary bombing in 1966. The incidence attracted a global concern about the security measures in the legislatures, radicalization prevention and preventions of terrorist attacks. The terror management theory and mortality salience hypothesis can be used to describe the situation in the Ottawa shootings. The review, therefore, focuses on how terror management theory and mortality salience hypothesis are used to reflect the shootings in Ottawa on October 22, 2014.
Terror management theory states that conflict results from having an instinct of self-preservation while realizing that death is inevitable and unpredictable to some extent. This conflict then creates terror, and terror can be managed by embracing various symbolic systems, or cultural beliefs that counter biological reality by bringing value and meaning. In our case study, Zehaf Bibeau, after converting to Islam, spends his life building and thinking in religious elements that makes him stand out different. Death creates anxiety in human beings; the nature of death is unknowable; it creates unexpected and random moments that no individual can be able to explain (Schmeichel, 2009). This is the reason why most individuals make efforts to avoid death. In our case, after noticing that Zehaf was shooting the people, the security personnel exchanged some bullets and ended up killing Zehab, the terrorist. This security personnel did this due to fear of death. This is described as the primary motivation in human behavior; individuals tend to think of themselves of worth and value; they have that feeling of permanence. A sense of heroism as that showed by the security personnel who killed the terrorists develops when the self-esteem of an individual increase. One, therefore, realizes that he is more important than any other living creature across the globe. Individuals, therefore, has to fight hard against death.
Self-esteem lies in the heart of the terror management theory; it is one of the most crucial aspects of its core paradigms. The approach generally explains the causes and impacts of self-esteem. Basing on the concept of culture and self-esteem according to Earnest Becker, terror management theory doesn’t only describe the ideology of self-worth but also the reason why it is needed in our daily life. Self-esteem is mainly used in coping with the anxiety mechanism.; here; individuals try to control their sense of terror and realization that they are just living trying to manage the environment that they are staying in (Greenberg, 2011). Zehaf Bibeau engaged in terror attacks only because he didn’t have enough self-esteem. He didn’t see the need for managing the environment that he was living in; in other words, he failed to understand his value as a human being. According to the terror management theory, self-esteem is a sense of personal value created by the morals in the validity of an individual’s cultural global view; Zehab lacked this sense of ownl value. People with more self-consciousness are regarded to have an increased death cognition and more negative life outlook as compared to those with lower self-awareness. This is the opposite of self-esteem; people with higher self-esteem view life more positively. Specifically, death in the form of anti-terrorist warning after mortality is made salient; this indicates that individuals use positivity as a buffer against anxiety. Continuing to hold various beliefs even after they are termed as flawed creates cognitive dissonance and the best way to avoid this is through ignoring the new information. Anxiety, therefore, buffers self-esteem in an individual allowing him to deal with the fears quickly. In this regard, death cognition caused negative reinforcement that leads Zehaf Bibeau to engage in terrorism; this is because accepting the new information of anti-terrorism would lead to reduced self-esteem increasing vulnerability and mortality awareness.
The mortality salience hypothesis states that if an individual’s cultural global view, or an individual’s self-esteem, serves as a death-denying function, scaring these constraints should create securities aim at restoring psychological equanimity. Mortality salience paradigms have been conducted through various experiments; individuals have been asked to depict their death, various researches have been done near the funeral homes among many more other methods. Mortality salience theory is used as a way of assessing terror management theory. In theory, it is evident that an individual can sustain faith in a cultural belief system and make life seem more meaningful and support the belief they are capable of enduring beyond their death (Jong, 2012). The best method to research about mortality resilience is to ask individuals to describe their death and explain what would physically happen to them when they die. It can be interpreted that the mortality salience encouraged the security personnel in the Ottawa shootings, 2014 to uphold their worldview by punishing Zehaf Bibeau who violated the morals of their worldview. They did this by shooting him 31 times until he died.
Various studies have proved that mortality salience leads individuals to react positively to the people who support their worldview and negatively to those who violate their world view norms. Zehaf was violating the standards in the Canadian world view, and this means that they had to deal with him. Even though he was a Canadian citizen, no law allows him to indulge in acts of shooting or involvement in terrorism. Researches investigating the cognitive processes involved in mortality salience impacts shows that mortality salience leads individuals towards distracting themselves from the thoughts of death. When Zehaf was planning on the shootings, he didn’t mind about his death. It is after a delay that death thoughts return to the consciousness fringes, and at this time the world view and self-esteem bolstering effects of mortality salience occurs.
In conclusion, to support terror management theory, the mortality resilience research in the shootings in Ottawa on October 22, 2014, demonstrates that the unconsciousness about one own death motivate multiple judgments to bolster the individuals in his self-worth and world view. The review, therefore, suggests that mortality concerns contribute to terrorism as well as cultural achievements and prosocial behavior.

References
Schmeichel, B. J., Gailliot, M. T., Filardo, E. A., McGregor, I., Gitter, S., & Baumeister, R. F. (2009). Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: the roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects. Journal of personality and social psychology, 96(5), 1077.
Greenberg, J., & Arndt, J. (2011). Terror management theory. Handbook of theories of social psychology, 1, 398-415.
Jong, J., Halberstadt, J., & Bluemke, M. (2012). Foxhole atheism, revisited: The effects of mortality salience on explicit and implicit religious belief. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(5), 983-989.