Just kidding. That would be the
intellectually consistent argument, but liberals in Europe, like in America,
don’t always follow arguments to their logical conclusion.
To recap: There have been four mass
killings or other terrorist attacks in Germany in just the past week, including
both a suicide bombing and a machete attack on Sunday, a mass shooting on
Friday, and an ax attack on a train last Monday. The bombing and ax attack appear
to have been inspired by ISIS, while the machete and shooting incidents are
currently thought to be unrelated. The shooter from the Friday attack was a
German citizen of Iranian heritage, while the other perpetrators were refugees
from either Syria or Afghanistan.
Following the attacks on Monday and
Sunday, the German government made no new proposals on how to stop more such
incidents. But after the Friday shooting, high-ranking officials wasted no time
naming the true perpetrator, and identifying exactly how similar scenarios
could be avoided. Liberals being the same the world over, the answer should
already be obvious: Stricter gun control laws would obviously have prevented
the tragedy.
Never mind that Germany already has some
of the strictest gun laws in the world, taking full advantage of the fact that
there is no inherent right of German citizens to bear arms. Never mind the fact
that the Friday shooter obtained his weapon illegally to begin with. For some
in the German government, there can never be too much gun control, and a crisis
must never be allowed to go to waste.
It should also go without saying that
there was no similar attempt to draw broad policy lessons from the other three
attacks. No calls to ban axes or machetes, just as there was no call to ban
trucks following the terrorist attack in Nice. And there was a noticeable
resistance by many in the German government to comment on the single variable
the ax, machete, and bombing attacks all had in common—namely, the national
origins of the perpetrators.
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