Cain Killed Abel With a Rock

 Tom Knighton at the website Bearing Arms has a story of a tragedy out of Hamburg, Germany entitled Latest On the Hamburg Shooting. Knighton reports that:

That peace was shattered on Thursday, however, when a shooter killed a number of people at a Jehovah’s Witnesses church in the city.

Eight people were killed in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness place of worship in the German city of Hamburg and the gunman was among the dead, police said on Friday.

Police received a call soon after 9 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Thursday and officers arrived at the scene to find several people seriously injured and some dead. “Then they heard a shot from above, they went upstairs and found one further person,” said a police spokesperson.

…

“We heard shots,” one unidentified witness told reporters. “There were 12 continuous shots,” he said. “Then we saw how people were taken away in black bags.”

The gunman was believed to be a former member of the Jehovah’s Witness community, Spiegel magazine reported. The man was aged between 30 and 40 and was not known to authorities as an extremist, the report said, citing unnamed sources.

So, why bring this up? You and I are unlikely to know anyone of the killed and injured. Nor are we likely to live close to where this happened. The point is that like most of Europe, Germany has pretty strict gun control laws. So, one of the questions is where did the shooter get a gun? And note too that this sort of thing is not unheard of in either Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, a shooter in Norway killed 77 people, 69 by shooting. Mass killings, even shootings, are not a uniquely American problem. And the fact that Europe suffers from mass shootings despite strict gun control shows us again that the problem can not be solved with gun control.

David Codrea, of the War on Guns has a saying that "If a man (or woman for that matter) can not be trusted with a gun, he also can not be trusted without a custodian." It points us to the true cause of mass shootings, or indeed any murders no matter the weapon used. It is the people. Why people are like this is a story for another day.  But if society can not trust a person with a weapon, they should be in jail until they can demonstrate they can be trusted. That may mean putting them in jail for life. It would help too if the government would stop making everything illegal. Then they might concentrate on truly serious crime.

Remember that Cain killed Abel with a rock. Rocks are everywhere.