It’s called journalism.
Plain and simple.
The worst part is that ultra-nationalism is on the rise not only in Germany, but seemingly in whole Europe. Two years ago I’ve seen squad of uniformed members of some nationalist party marching around in Warsaw. Since that time I’ve moved out and live in very rural town where nothing much happens, but the thought of it still gives me creeps.
Sounds like QANON bullshit and stochastic terrorism.
is it a terrorist attack? A gang gone wild?
Recent reports tells us the murderer was 43, one of the dead is his mother, five others have Turkish nationality.
The person also reportedly left a trail of conspiracy theory bullshit, including a “manifesto” of some sort, and he felt “followed” by government agencies (so far unspecified, but likely foreign, as - also reportedly - he filed a complaint with the German BKA.
ETA: Update. Nine of the eleven who were killed have a migrant background, leaving only the fucking arse who murdered them and his mother to be “random” victims.
This is terrorism. Even if the legal requirement (i.e., at least three people conspiring) is not met. The federal prosecutors office said the attack was “deeply racist”.
… aaand here’s how their reporters went around putting pressure on victim’s families and publicly insinuated how the terror victims may, or may not have had a criminal background - a common trope with both German conservatives and the far right, that serves multiple aims, such as to downplay far right terrorism, and deligitimize whole ethnic groups in a racist manner. Fuck BILD, they are part of the whole fucking problem - like in, the whole fucking swamp of conservative borderline terror sympathizers, who would never admit to it, but implicitely do by reiterating again and again that they are far more concerned about certain ethnic groups living in Germany, than with them being murdered.
For anyone wondering about German weapons laws, you can get nearly anything in Germany that you can get in the US. But they do have a stringent license system, unlike here.
According to the guy below, about a million license holders in Germany. (The semi-famous maker sling shot guy who makes some truly bonkers contraptions.) He mentions you have to have training and a clean record to get a license, but doesn’t mention if they delve into whether you are affiliated with any radical groups or not. (Ironically, you can’t have a wrist support on your sling shot.)
All evidence at this point does in fact point to a right wing terrorist attack.
The number the radio gave of active members of these kinds of right wing groups in Germany is as high as 32,000… That’s a large number of people.
Make that around the world.
Massive overstatement.
While Germany exports military small arms on a world class scale, “getting” e.g. an assault rifle is not easy.
There are no over-the-counter sales of this type of weapons.
Thanks for the link. Her statement is quite remarkable in several ways. She speaks of racism, not xenophobia (Fremdenfeindlichkeit). She draws a direct line from the NSU murders over the murder of Lübke and the terrorism at Halle an der Saale. Most extraordinarily, there is no wiggling in the direction of “all kinds of extremism are bad”.
Plain and simple: racism is a poison. This poison is amongst us, within our society.
That’s actually one of the clearest anti-racism statements I can remember coming from a high-profile conservative politician in Germany. Ever.
Well the guy in the video has an HK MP5 (I am assuming it is a semi-auto) and said you can get just about anything if you have the license for it.
As for getting something “easy”, I’d say it is much harder due to their licensing process which looks like takes a minimum of a year to get. But if one wanted a semi-auto rifle, one could apply for and get a license that allows that. So given that, one could say no firearms are “over the counter”, but they are available if you have the license.
Here is another source saying the same thing:
Alarmingly large. For now most of them stay low, but it won’t be this way if some future government gives them them implicit approval (like head of the state saying “there were fine people on both sides”).
Thats the thing. We all have clicheés in our head. Dumb, sometimes borderline racist clicheés. Thats we always have to question ourselves, our way of thinking when something like this happens.
So am I right you are in Germany?
No, I live in Poland - previously I lived in Warsaw and worked as scientist, but I resigned because that increasingly felt like a rat race and now I run a small furniture manufacturing workshop in a Polish town near Belarus border. It’s an interesting place, because lots of different cultures mix there. Having said that these ultra-nationalist groups are similar in whole Europe (and, as @Mindysan33 said, whole world) so such development is worrying.
“Getting anything” to keep it in your home is one thing, being allowed to carry it around in public is quite another.
Obtaining a license to carry a weapon in Germany is actually quite difficult and expensive (we don’t have the Second Amendment here, which is just as well), and is basically confined to people who can convince the officials in charge that they are exposed to credible threats to life and limb. In practice this means that you’re working for a security company or a company that transports money or very valuable items, and even then your employer will need to certify that the nature of your job makes it likely that you will be attacked. In any case chances are that you will not end up with a license to carry anything other than a pistol (probably not an H&K MP5 and quite certainly not anything resembling an AR-15). You must be 18 years old or more, you may not have a criminal record, you must carry liability insurance covering at least 1 million euros, and you must appear mentally and physically capable of handling a weapon responsibly. An addiction to alcohol or drugs will, for example, disqualify you. The license is valid for at most three years and then you have to apply again. (To put this into perspective, there was a high-profile case the other day where the mayor of some town in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia applied for a license to carry a gun on the grounds that someone had made a death threat against him. That application was refused.)
Having said that, a license to carry a weapon is quite distinct from a license to own a weapon, which is separate (and of course being licensed to own a weapon is a prerequisite for a license to carry it around, ready to use). You can get the latter, e.g., if you are a card-carrying member of a marksmanship club, a gunsmith, or a gun collector, and there are restrictions on the number and type of guns you can buy as well as on storage (usually in a locked gun safe at home, with the ammunition in a separate locked safe) and transport (usually unloaded, in a locked container in the boot of your car, and only between your home and the shooting range or wherever a competition is taking place).
Finally, if you have a hunting license you don’t need a license to carry a weapon if you’re only using it when hunting (you still need a license-to-own), and police and customs officers and members of the armed forces are entitled to carry a weapon in the course of their duties (they still need a license if they want to carry a weapon off duty, like any other private person).
