Munich (the latest in the “pray for” series . . .) – with updates

From the Daily Mail (of course):  “‘Several dead’ and 10 injured in shooting rampage inside a Munich shopping centre as police hunt gunman.”

And:  reports of a second shooting at Marienplatz.  (Sky News; I could only find a twitter link.)

According to the Express, the second shooting was actually at Karlsplatz, which isn’t the “main square” but at the other end of the pedestrianized shopping street.  The whole mass transit system has also been shut down.

(I’m plucking these links from the twitter hashtag #Munich.)

Shooter(s) still at large.

Context:  the Olympia Shopping Center is not a tourist destination, but just a shopping mall for locals.  Marienplatz is, of course, right at the very heart of the city, but Karlzplatz is again more a destination for locals, especially at this time of day, because it’s early evening locally right now.

And, for regular readers, Marienplatz is exactly where I was a week ago, though we left before dinner.

Oh, and, I just remembered:  my niece is a police officer trainee there!

UPDATE:

According to Deutsche Welle, there were 9 killed, and 21 injured, of which 3 seriously, but the killer was found dead, having committed suicide, near the OEZ.  He was a local, of Iranian origin, 18 years old.  The shooting reports at Karlsplatz and Marienplatz were false alarms.

Saturday morning updates:

Just checking the latest reports on twitter.  According to The Local.de, the dead consist of three Turkish nationals, one Greek,and three Kosavars.  (Here’s another source on the Kosavars.) A further article says that Munich police believe that he was inspired by Brevik (which makes sense; on twitter there were comments that yesterday was the 5th anniversary of that attack), not ISIS.

“There is absolutely no link to the Islamic State,” Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said.

He said the assault was a “classic act by a deranged person” and described an individual “obsessed” with mass shootings.

He said German investigators saw an “obvious link” between Friday’s killings and Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in a bomb attack in Oslo and a shooting rampage on the nearby island of Utoya exactly five years earlier.

Most of the victims in Friday’s attack were foreigners.

According to the Mirror (yes, these are all links from twitter and Drudge, which is just a convenient way of finding reports), the killer was an 18 year old son of a taxi driver with dual German and Iranian citizenship.  He’s reported to have said, “because of you I was bullied for 7 years.”

Which suggests that the motivation was not Brevik’s, strictly speaking, or, rather, not as simple as a neo-Nazi hatred of foreigners as racially impure — but rather, perhaps, an anger that he himself was lumped in with the horde of never-ending, non-assimilating, uneducated foreigners.

The link also mentions someone on Dachauerstrasse who knew the killer — just checked the map and that’s quite close to the OEZ.  The killer also said, “I grew up here in the Harz 4 area” — I don’t know enough about the local area to know whether the “here” was specifically this neighborhood, but “Harz 4 area” refers to unemployment/welfare benefits, so “Harz 4” means “poor neighborhood.”  Was, then, the OEZ was his target for no special reason other than that was his neighborhood, and a place with a high concentration of foreigners?  Whether he targeted foreigners in his shooting, or whether the McDonald’s (or other locations with victims — that detail’s not clear to me yet) was simply, in general, frequented by immigrants, I haven’t seen reported.

So:

Knowing this, knowing that this was, from what we know now, not an ISIS attack:  is that better?  Is that worse?  Does that enable you to shrug it off and say, “oh, another mass killing by an angry teen,” or even, “eh, 9 dead isn’t so much”?

Saturday evening:  The Daily Mail now filled in more details about the killer.  He lived two miles from the shooting site, was a drop-out from his vocational high school, did little other than play video games, threatened to kill others well before the attack, and had complained about “bullying by ‘Turkish and Arabic’ schoolmates” in the past.  So, more like the Sandy Hook killer, perhaps, except that he seemingly illegally purchased a pistol of the sort generally prohibited for ordinary citizens, rather than using guns legally owned by the family.

As further context, see this article on guns in Germany, “Five things to know about guns in Germany.”  Some data:  there are significant hoops to jump through to get authorization to own a gun, but, nonetheless:

the country was still home to the fourth-highest number of legal guns per capita in 2013, falling behind just the United States, Switzerland and Finland.
About 2 million people own more than 5.5 million legal guns in Germany for a population of more than 80 million.

On top of that, police unions have estimated that there are up to 20 million more illegally-owned guns in Germany – this would mean roughly 30 guns for every group of 100 people.

Nonetheless, gun crime is relatively low, and yesterday’s shooting was the first mass shooting since 2009.