EIt was, as was horribly evident on Thursday evening, a valid tip that the Hamburg Weapons Authority received in January. The later gunman apparently suffered from a mental disorder, which expressed itself, among other things, in anger at Jehovah’s Witnesses, it said quite specifically, but anonymously. He had left the religious community more than a year ago in a dispute. The anger has now erupted in a killing spree as delusional, senseless and mysterious as so many before it.
The state and society owe the victims of this tragedy, their relatives and Jehovah’s Witnesses an answer as to whether the crime could have been prevented in view of this history. The Weapons Authority investigated the tip and appeared in February for an unannounced inspection at the gun owner’s house. That yielded nothing.
So again one of those anonymous tips that are nothing but hot air and denunciation? Should have been prodded because it was a gun owner? Doesn’t that amount to general suspicion? After all, the Weapons Act provides that the mentally ill are unfit to own a gun. Should have checked whether such a disease was present?
Only civilized vigilance offers protection
With a little research, at least the confused body of thought that Philipp F. had spread should have been noticeable. But is every muddlehead already a psychopath and potential gunman? Hamburg’s interior authority will have to ask itself these questions, although at least one answer is already obvious. The authorities are overwhelmed if they want to get to the bottom of every anonymous suspicion.
But fatalism is just as inappropriate. Killing sprees are not strokes of fate that our society must take as its scourge, because the very nature of its world produces such monstrous crimes. Our state is not powerless against it. This case also shows this in several respects.
The police reacted very quickly, so quickly that even more victims could be prevented. In other cases, she was able to stop shooters from doing what they did. The reason is civilized forms of vigilance, from the secret service to the neighborhood. Not much would have been missing in Hamburg, and it would have been successful here too. But not much is still too much.
#Rampages #strokes #fate