Since first reporting it that night, I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the terrorist attack in Germany. Instead of the two people killed that I reported then, the death toll has run up to five, making it a mass murder by any definition you care to name. It also seems that the doctor who carried it out wasn’t an Islamist, but quite the opposite. It was still terrorism, just without the “Allah Akbar” thing. 

In addition to the five dead, more than 200 people were injured, making it a particularly nasty form of mass murder.

Which is interesting to me. After all, we’re told that if we had strict gun control laws, our own mass murder problem would disappear. I’m not buying it, and neither is the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, who sent this via a press release.

The terror attack in a Magdeburg, Germany public market killing five people and injuring 200 more proved once again that restrictive gun control hardly guarantees public safety against determined acts of murder and mayhem anywhere in the world, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the holiday season attack was reminiscent of the murderous outrage in July 2016 against people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. There, 86 people were killed and many more injured by a madman driving a stolen freight truck through a crowd. Add to that the 2021 rampage in Waukesha, Wisconsin when a deranged career criminal drove an SUV into a crowd watching a Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring 62 others, he recalled.

“Time and again we have warned that restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens is a bogus solution to violent crime, whether on a mass scale or an individual act,” Gottlieb observed. “Disarming honest, peaceable people only creates the dangerous illusion that something has been done to protect the public, and the gun prohibition lobby knows it. Their interest has never been reducing crime, but only discouraging and reducing private gun ownership.

“In recent days,” he continued, “we’ve also seen news reports about fatal stabbings in Azusa, California, Miami, Florida and Seattle, Washington. A few days ago, a woman in New Jersey was allegedly bludgeoned to death. In Philadelphia, a woman was strangled over the weekend. A woman on a New York subway was set on fire and burned to death, allegedly by an illegal alien who was once deported during the Trump administration. 

“I call attention to these crimes,” Gottlieb explained, “because they illustrate how individuals are responsible for criminal violence, not the tool they use. Whether people use guns, knives, blunt objects, vehicles, cigarette lighters or bare hands, it is the perpetrator who is ultimately responsible for their evil acts, and shifting blame to the weapon neither solves the problem nor prevents another, similar crime from happening an hour, day or month later. We don’t try to restrict ownership of motor vehicles, knives, hammers, baseball bats, lighters or any other object which can be used as a weapon. Only firearms, which are constitutionally protected. 

“Restricting the right to keep and bear arms, which is protected by the federal and state constitutions is a flimsy sham that is wearing thinner by the day,” he concluded, “and incidents like those in Magdeburg, Waukesha, Nice, Miami, Philadelphia, New York and Seattle only prove that point.”

It should be noted that nearly 92 percent of all households have at least one car. That’s about three times more than the estimated number of households with a firearm.

This is not the first vehicle rampage we’ve seen. In addition to the attacks listed above, there was the 2017 truck attack in New York City that left eight people dead and 13 innocent bystanders injured.

Gottlieb points out all the various ways people kill, and we cannot overstate this. The most dangerous thing most of us will ever encounter is an individual. It’s not a tool. It’s not a weapon. It’s not an ordinary thing we all have and don’t think that much about. It’s a person who knows all the ways you can be injured or killed.

In the movie John Wick, in order to establish just how dangerous Keanu Reeves’s character actually is, the antagonist points out how he saw John Wick kill three men in a bar with a pencil. On some level, even Hollywood knows that it’s the person who is dangerous, as they sought to establish with this character.

Generally, the movies don’t reflect real life all that much. Yet it can be illustrative of things that exist in real life from time to time. This is one of those times.

What happened in Germany is beyond awful. I absolutely hate hearing about stuff like this during the Christmas season, but terrorism has always depended on people in large numbers.

It doesn’t depend on guns, which is the point.