I do not celebrate mass shootings anywhere in the world. I still remember the feeling of finding out a dear friend had been murdered in one, so even at my worst, that's something I could never do. When I point out a massacre elsewhere in the world, it's not to celebrate that it happened there, but to point out that the claim of these being "uniquely American" is bogus.
And the latest example was in Stade, Germany, on Monday.
A 45-year-old man killed six adults and wounded several others in a shooting attack at a child welfare facility in northern Germany on Monday, in what the local authorities described as a dispute over the custody of the man’s daughter.
The daytime assault in the small city of Stade, roughly 30 miles west of Hamburg, killed six employees of the facility and a neighboring youth center, and it shocked a country where strict gun laws have made mass shootings a rarity.
“This was a murder committed for family reasons — an extremely coldblooded act of violence with no political or economic motives,” Daniela Behrens, the interior minister for the state of Lower Saxony, which includes Stade, told reporters at a press briefing on Monday evening.
The man had an appointment on Monday at a child welfare facility in Stade to visit his 3-month-old daughter and discuss future custody of her, officials said at the briefing. The daughter and her mother, 34, were inside the building.
Responding to reports of shots fired in the facility around noon, police officers found the man fleeing in the passenger seat of a Mercedes, with a 65-year-old woman behind the wheel.
Police reportedly opened fire on the vehicle, hitting no one inside, but both were taken into custody.
The daughter was not injured in the attack, and her mother was questioned by police for what should be pretty damn obvious reasons.
It should be remembered that Germany has extensive gun control laws, though that hasn't stopped mass killings there. Sure, they happen less often than here, but they're not always mass shootings, either. Hell, they've used cars, even. My point is that even when the gun control seems to work to stop a mass shooting, it doesn't protect lives so much as makes it so that the killers need another weapon.
Still, this guy got a gun.
To get one lawfully, it takes at least a year or two, and you have to go through psychological and physical screenings to make sure you're "fit enough" to get a gun. You have to have a specific need to own a gun, and self-defense isn't one of those needs. You have to show that you know how to handle the weapon. There's a host of requirements, and they're not particularly easy to clear.
And yet, here we are.
Look, the problem with these kinds of attacks isn't the weapon used. I promise you, I wouldn't have felt better if my friend was killed with a knife, a car, or a hammer. She'd still be gone, and I'd never get to talk to her again. The fact that the guy used a gun instead doesn't change that, and it doesn't really change much for the families of these six people.
It might change things a bit for the wounded, but only because gunshot wounds are different from knife wounds. That's mostly it.
The underlying problem is that there are people involved, and no one seems to give a damn about identifying what it is that makes some people do things like this, while most of the rest of us are too damned decent to even consider it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun control policies and schemes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member