As Jim Gehaghty said on Twitter: “No German chancellor has done more to change the demographics of Europe since… oh”.
In a scene which is all too common in Angela Merkel’s Germany, an immigrant (who had attained German citizenship), attempted mass murder using both fire and a knife. He failed to kill any of his victims, and was restrained and arrested by bystanders.
From RFERL.org:
The prosecutor’s office said the incident began when the attacker set fire to a backpack on the bus.
The driver said he stopped the bus after seeing smoke and was attacked by the suspect.
As the assailant left the bus, he stabbed several people with a 13-centimeter kitchen knife, the driver said.
Passengers then overpowered the man outside the bus and held him for police.
Investigators said flammable liquid was found in the backpack but no explosives.
The motive remains a mystery…
The authorities on July 20 said there was no information on the motive for the attack on a local bus in the northern city of Luebeck. They added they had no immediate indication the suspect had any links to terrorism or had been radicalized.
If it had just been a knife, I might be more receptive to a mental illness defense. However, bringing a backpack fire-accelerants seems to indicate a higher level of forethought and planning.
"No German chancellor has done more to change the demographics of Europe since… oh."
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) December 9, 2015
tillerately, hilter.
Except, in this case, the genius that is Merkel seems bent on the utter destruction of the German ppl and her country.
Wait, how is this possible? I thought people would be made safe by banning folding pocket knives in public, etc? I suppose now we’ll have to ban kitchen knives as well. Or at least ban carrying them in public; that way we can have suitable statute to charge the offender under after he finishes committing his (or her) crime and the blood is cleaned up, etc.
Seriously, I don’t see how anyone can fail to see the obvious: a person can easily carry a kitchen knife, a box cutter, a garden tool, a sharpened stick, whatever, into public, simply by making moderately wise clothing choices and using a little forethought. It’s not hard to carry an 8 inch kitchen knife concealed on your person for long enough to commit a crime with it. Bans achieve nothing, except perhaps the dubious benefit that it gives the police a “tool” with which to apprehend and charge a person if they think he looks “suspicious” and detain him and search him while on his way to rob a store. That’s the only way premeditated crimes will ever be prevented by banning knives. It does give prosecutors an additional “tool” to use against the perp when charging him, but that doesn’t prevent the crime, and you’ve got to catch him (using “him’ in the sense of “a human being”, not necessarily of the male sex). The only LIKELY type of crime to be prevented by banning carrying of knives is un-premeditated violence, in which a person who is enraged cannot pull out a knife and stab another person if he doesn’t have one with him. Although this may be true in some cases, in many cases the type of person who is likely to loose temper and control enough to do such a thing isn’t often inclined to follow the law too closely. The other, related, class is young gang members and thugs, who feel it a matter of honor to defend their names with deadly violence, either either with a knife or more often a gun, these days. So you end up with a city like NYC, prosecuting thousands of peaceable citizens under a statute designed to prevent gang members from murdering each other (I suppose they are also afraid that if people start using deadly force when a gang member tries to rob them it will bring the “homicide’ numbers of the city up significantly. Better to let them rob with impunity than to have the numbers get worse!)
Of course that has little to do with the article, other than that banning knives can not, and will never be able to, prevent attacks like this. The guy could have sharpened a metal file and used that with just as much (or more, honestly) effect as here. What, are we going to ban all knives except very short kitchen knives with fragile, frangible blades that automatically break into pieces under more than 5 lbs of force? Start mandating implanted GPS trackers in the blades of all knives whatsoever? Idiocy.