We’re learning more about the teenage boy who murdered 9 people in Munich.
The teen gunman who killed nine people in a shooting rampage in Munich on Friday was a mentally troubled individual who had extensively researched spree killings and had no apparent links to ISIS, police said.
Speaking at a press conference in the southern German city Saturday, police officials said the 18-year-old lone attacker — who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound — had no political motivations, and no references to religion had been found in documents in his home.
OK, definitely not ISIS-related. But what’s this about no political motivation? He was obsessed with mass killers, chose to go on his rampage on the 5th anniversary of the coward Breivik’s killings, and had Breivik’s image as an online avatar. He chose his victims: people who looked like immigrants to Germany.
The teenage friends comprised two boys of Turkish origin and two girls from Kosovan families, bolstering the theory that Sonboly chose his victims as he rampaged through McDonald’s and into a busy shopping centre. In all, seven of his victims were teenagers and the oldest was a 45-year-old mother of two of Turkish descent.
He was politically motivated, all right. These are the actions of a follower of the alt-right. That’s only non-political to a media that treats far right villainy as the default.
I guess personal hatred of ethnic groups doesn’t formally qualify as “political”. Without coaching by a group trying to make a political point. Nevermind my use of political as a modified form of the word “polite”.
While his actions may be similar to those advocated by a political movement that he might have absorbed through the media…
[ack, I’m, digging a contradiction hole]
[backpedaling] yes, it was a political action. Whatever directly motivated him, whether just osmotic absorption or direct coaching.
Political Motivation is goddamn obvious.
I’m curious: Does the local media ignore his political affiliation like the U.S. media does? I also noticed that they couldn’t help but talk about the fact he suffered depression. Gotta blame it on something safe, I guess.
Personally I wouldn’t expect an angry teenager with social and behavioural problems to have anything worth calling a “political affiliation”. I guess we’ll find out if he had any sort of coherent ideology, or mainly liked Breivik because he was a successful racist mass murderer.
ck: Because we have more than two political parties, German media are less openly partisan than those in the US. So they’re less likely to try and draw political capital from this sort of thing by assigning political blame. We’ll certainly hear about it if he liked NPD Facebook posts or whatever, though.
That said, I’m expecting a lot of editorials blaming the AfD and their inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric.
I suppose it’s just about possible to argue that he might have been obsessed solely with the glamour and notoriety aspect of spree killers, and entirely unconcerned about furthering the kinds of political agendas they usually have. I’m not sure it makes much difference – whatever his mental inner landscape may have been, he’s furthering those agendas anyway.
I’m wondering, though, and those with a better understanding of the German language than I have might be able to answer this – does the word that has been put into English as “political” (politische?) have quite the same breadth of application in German? Is it perhaps used more narrowly, to refer only to constitutional party political business say?
I’m not sure a teenage kid bullied and from an ethnic background is the banner bearer of right wing ideology. No matter who his idols were.
I am very concerned at the disproportionate reporting on European crime vs (say) the 80 killed in Kabal yesterday. I would be very happy to write balancing posts on the New Frontier if desired. I come from a UK female minority perspective.
Cartimandua1@gmail.com
What’s happening to you, PZ?
Usually you are a lot more cautious than this.
First the Graham thing, and now this?
You are jumping to conclusions to fit your ideology. This is not you.
I think it’s early at best to say that it was politically motivated. This could very well be a case similar to Columbine.
ck @ 2
Germany is probably ignoring the possible politics of the gunman for the same reasons they desperately ignore their own nation’s history between 1933 and 1945.
Akira MacKenzie @7: You do know that it is literally illegal to ignore what the Nazis did in Germany, right? Seriously, the only country in the world that possibly pays more attention to that bit of German history is Israel.
@8
I mean, apparently a significant amount of Germans either missed that memo or missed the “nazis were the bad guys” part, given the upswing in violent xenophobic rhetoric, even down to the “weird foreigners fucking our economy” claims.
From what I’ve seen from the french and german media, they’re not ignoring it per se, but the pundits have a hard time computing his far-right sympathies with his iranian ancestry.
I think you’re trying too hard to find some kind of “political” motive. Yes, he admired Breivik; but, as this Guardian article points out, he “… read about US school shootings in a meticulously researched book by a US academic, Why Kids Kill. Sonboly’s interest in American school killers appears to have been matched by his admiration for another teenage attacker who killed 15 people after opening fire at his old school in the southwest German town of Winnenden in 2009.”
So his “idolizing” of Breivik appears to have been more along the lines of “Wow, that guy really killed a lot of teenagers!” rather than “I like his politics!” (And Breivik didn’t single out foreigners — he went after Norwegians with the wrong politics.)
“He chose his victims: people who looked like immigrants to Germany.”
It seems clear that he chose teenage victims preferentially, but I have some difficulty with the assumption that he targeted people who “looked like immigrants”, especially since we don’t currently know the ethnicities of the 27 injured people. (And with one exception we don’t even know what the victims “looked like” — some Turks and plenty of Kosovars look like Central Europeans.) And then there’s the problem of he himself being exactly what he was supposedly trying to kill.
Akira MacKenzie: Oh, go fuck yourself. We did the WWI – Weimar Republic – WWII period of our history (yes, including the holocaust, in exhaustive detail of planning and execution) THREE TIMES during my school education. It’s almost the only thing we DID spend any time on in history class. There are war memorials everywhere. There are little brass paving stones in the sidewalk in front of residential buildings with the names and fates of people who were deported. There are ceremonies of mourning on all the big war anniversaries. We went on a school trip to Auschwitz.
So you can fuck right off with your borderline racist stereotypes.
Like, if we want to argue whether Germans or the German state have learned the right lessons from their history, or whether the national mourning is sincere, sure. If you want to claim that Germany’s preoccupation with mourning and atoning for its war crimes is insincere and mainly intended to improve its international image, whatever. That’s a discussion one can have.
But to claim that anyone here is “desperately ignoring” the Nazi period is the opposite of true. It’s ubiquitous. It’s the most prominent period of our history in the mind of anyone who isn’t a historical specialist.
So I’ll assume that you get your knowledge of German politics from Family Guy, combined with perhaps a projection of what you think you/your government would do in a similar situation.
Vivec, @9
I think it’s unfair to single out Germans while there’s a not insignificant pirtion of every fucking single “Western” country (and many non-Western ones) that has missed the same memo.
At least to this non-German European, populism in Germany seems to be less prominent than in other European countries like Austria, Italy, UK, France, Belgium or the Netherlands
Yes, it does seem somewhat rich to presume that the far right fringe of neo-Nazis in Germany are somehow representative of wider trends in German atttitudes to their own history. From what I have seen of it, Germany is actually one of the best countries in the world as far as acknowledging and learning from its history goes. Particularly with regard to the Nazi period and its atrocities. If anything modern neo-Nazis in Germany are reacting AGAINST German cultural norms. Unconditional condemnation of the Nazi ethos is ubiquitous in Germany – state mandated to some significant degree in fact. Being an neo-Nazi in Germany is far, far more transgressive than it is anywhere else in the world. I suspect that’s part of its allure to disaffected bigots in Germany – and every country has its disaffected bigots.
Compare how Japan and the US have tended to deal with the legacy of their wartime atrocities, and the difference is profound. The Japanese really have tended to ignore the past and pretend that it’s all over now, all irrelevant, and nothing to do with us anymore. In part this has been facilitated by traditional Japanese atttitudes towards blame, shame, responsibility and authority; the people in charge have been punished, everyone else was just following orders, it has all been sorted out now and so shame does not accrue. Meanwhile the US paints the second world war as a glorious exercise in its own righteousness, and everything it did as morally justified. Horrors such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the internment of Japanese-American people are seen as necessary and brave steps to take, shorn of all their original contentiousness and political connotations. Comparing US and German foreign policy over the last fifty years, it becomes painfully apparent which nation has learned nothing from the 20th Century.
And since I am English, I will note that we could be a bit more open about our own nefarious activities too. We interned German and Italian people in camps during the second world war, and don’t talk about it all that much. Though our real blind spot as far as history goes is not with that period but with our Empire and its effects.
I was going to write a longer reply to Cartomancer, but briefly, I believe for many of their victims there would have been no difference between the Third Reich and the Empire. The Empire probably did more damage because it lasted for several hundred years longer than the 13-Year Reich. I am English, but I have lived in Germany and speak German. In my experience most Germans are far more aware of the nasty side of their history than most of the British are of theirs.
It’s so fucking rich that Vivec – a person who routinely plays the Social Justice card to denigrate others as “sexist” by saying they “misgender” her (Bernie Bros is and always has been an unisex term, dummie) – so casually displays her racism.
Newsflash, everyone here in Germany hates the Nazis. Even the increasingly authoritarian theocrats From the “Christian Democrats.” They’re a fucking fringe and will stay one. If you haven’t noticed, actual fascists have taken over other European countries (Orban, anyone?), while here right-wing populism is a clown show which is marked by infighting and division into ever smaller units (the AfD and PEGIDA, respectively).
My pronouns are they/them, as I’ve pointed out to you in the past.
(Also, you can’t pull the “Bernie Bros is a unisex term” thing, because you have specifically called me a man before.)
In terms to this supposed Racism, I think you missed the point of what I’m saying. All I said is that if these right wing ideologues are going to espouse the same sort of “ew these gross foreigners are destroying our economy and raping our precious women” rhetoric that the nazis did, they clearly didn’t learn the lesson well enough.
I’m not really sure how that maths out to racism, especially given that German is an ethnicity, but sure, whatever.
@14
Fair enough, but Germans are the group in question at the moment. I think that anyone who espouses that kind of violent xenophobic rhetoric clearly didn’t learn their lesson from the Nazis, German or otherwise.
Also, your claim that Bernie Bro is a unisex term contradicts earlier times you’ve used it, such as this choice quote from you
I also still don’t fucking get why I keep getting grouped in with them, seeing as, from day fucking one, I’ve been vocally in favor of “do literally whatever it takes to avoid a trump presidency, up to and including voting and actively campaigning for hillary”
Yeah, but if he had yelled “Allah Akbar!” at any moment, then none of his motivation would have been political – it would have all been religion.
Vivec@#22:
I also still don’t fucking get why I keep getting grouped in with them, seeing as, from day fucking one, I’ve been vocally in favor of “do literally whatever it takes to avoid a trump presidency, up to and including voting and actively campaigning for hillary”
Don’t you get it? You’re being divisive of the party! Now is the time to UNIFY which means pretending that Hillary is the best thing since sliced whitebread.
@24
What’s literally fucking rich is being called a “Bernie or Bust” person, seeing as one of my very first posts on Pharyngula was an argument in favor of voting for Hillary if she wins the nomination.
Well, almost as rich as asserting that Bernie Bros is a unisex term, and then simultaneously asserting that they’re white male neckbeards.
Well, seems like he was a fan of mass murderers. He had also extensively researched the school shooter of Winnenden as well as Breivik.
I know too little about how close the victims were together, but it’s not unthinkable that he simply shot the first group he saw which happened to be majority muslim.
@2 .ck, the Irate Lump
23 July 2016 at 8:56 pm
I’m curious: Does the local media ignore his political affiliation like the U.S. media does? I also noticed that they couldn’t help but talk about the fact he suffered depression. Gotta blame it on something safe, I guess.”
I think mental illness is very often a factor in mass shootings. It is likely in someone who reads a great deal about mass killings and then commits one. At the very least he is probably suicidal, which may be a result of depression. What is wrong with talking about this?
Suicidal by cop,that is.
applehead: I can’t find the originator right now, but
The greatest disservice one can do to a cause is to defend it with poor arguments.
Like…I’ve been on the receiving end of the Morality Score Mob here several times before, but I like to think I’ve at least had the presence of mind to disappear and inject my arguments where they help.
To partially answer my question in @27 -what is wrong with talking about mental illness in these shootinga- I remember from a recent thread here that I found evidence in professional journals that MI was found in cases of filicide (killing one’s children) much more often than in other killings(perhaps in a majority of cases vs. About 5% in the general population) ; and that though MI is not found more often in homicide in general, it is very likely PRESENT MORE OFTEN than in the general population because MI is so underdiagnosed.
So, while some may object to mentioning MI because it unfairly Sigma times the mentally ill, I’m suggesting that in some cases of homicide, namely filicide especially, but also in mass shootings, that MI may often Play a role, especially when so many of these people know they will die. I exclude of course, many of those who do so for primarily political or religious reasons. Even then MI could be a factor.
I don’t think it’s wise to consider applehead a good faith commentator.
I think there’s ample reason to suggest that they aren’t one. Coming into every thread tangentially related to politics to shit stir, complain about teh bernie broz, and then say something homophobic/misogynist/transphobic is a pattern for them.
1) It’s dangerous pseudoscientific bullshit.
2) Oh, wait – that’s pretty much it.
@32
All studies done on the prevalence of mental illness in various populations in are dangerous pseudoscientific bullshit? Posting that list is no support of that. Nor is a careful reading of many of the books on the list. I agree with many of the criticisms of psychology and psychiatry in many of these books. There is still much of value. Certainly with prevalence studies.
With my Ph.D in psychology I’ve been trained as a clinician and a scientist, so I have some experience and expertise in evaluating these works. What is your experience? The “about me” space at your site is blank. Who are you?
Saltycurrent Current
I’ve read your post at your blog titled “Friday, April 24, 2015
Psychiatry-skepticism-social justice reading list: user-friendly edition.”
I see that your criticisms are all about psychiatry,not psychology, and I agree pretty much with all of them. I would say that your criticisms doe not apply to all psychiatrists or all psychiatry training programs. There are many psychiatrists who agree with and are working to change things, notably, Allen Frances, who has a blog at Psychology Today. It’s late and I’m tried but one more thing -psychology and psychologists are often very different from psychiatrists in a good way. With respect to the research that I mentioned reviewing in @29 the criticisms of the several dozen studies do not apply. Perhaps you have decided that the whole field of the study of mental illness is all, as you say, pseudo scientific bullshit, but I belief that is not true. Certainly this is true- many people are mentally ill and can be diagnosed as such. Also the studies which measure prevalence are measuring something real and pretty well. Therefore the conclusion reached in @29 are well supported, as far as I can tell. Now if you don’t believe MI exists or can be validly and reliably detected and described then you will of course disagree with this. While there is a whole lot wrong with the DSM-V, studies done with earlier versions have yielded valid results, IMO. Allen Francis was the director of DSM-V task force, is very critical of V, And has two books out which criticize it and provide a falter native. A friend of mine, a psych ologist who was the research director of IV was forced out of V, apparently because they didn’t want to be too tied down by science and e,primal matters. A great pity given what V turned out to be.
Correction@34
Allen Frances was director of DSM-V not DSM-V.
Another correction. Sorry it’s late and I’m tired. and tried.
DSM-V people didn’t “want to be too tied down by science and EMPIRICAL, not e,primal, matters.
“All studies done on the prevalence of mental illness in various populations” is a very broad and vague concept. For certain definitions – e.g., studies based on DSM diagnoses – it is pseudoscientific bullshit, and yes, a careful, and even not particularly careful, reading of several of the books on that list does show it. The book by Kirk, Gomory, and Cohen especially talks about this (I review it here and here), but others do as well. If the diagnoses themselves aren’t valid, which leading figures in psychiatry have publicly acknowledged they aren’t, then prevalence studies aren’t measuring something valid. This isn’t to say that people can’t, through asking questions, determine how many people are, say, extremely depressed. As long as it’s acknowledged that what’s being measured isn’t the prevalence of a biological illness and researchers operationalize “depressed” in a reasonable way, I have no problem with such research and think it can be very useful.
The issue I have with bringing up mental illness in this specific context is that it promotes the bogus idea that mental problems are biological illnesses and that people who “have” these illnesses are particularly dangerous, and so encourage the public to accept and support policies denying some people labeled as “mentally ill” their human rights, including not just access to guns but the right to refuse drugs or institutionalization. It also tends to marginalize social and political issues while locating the problem in the individual rather than seeing individual problems in terms of social, political, and economic contexts (it also tends to definitionally remove things like violent racism or misogyny from consideration as mental problems that need to be addressed).
If the conversation could become “What in our social world is pushing people to feel and act in these ways, and how can we help the people most affected while changing society for the better?” it would be great, and some people (including you, for all I know) are working on those sorts of questions. But overwhelmingly, bringing “mental illness” into these discussions currently – in the US, at least – takes the form described above.
Yes, I should have been more clear. I was responding like that to the suggestion regarding the usefulness of including “mental illness” in these discussions because the public discourse surrounding mental/emotional problems has been so shaped by psychiatry that real and useful psychological research and insights are rarely heard. Most of my criticisms are about psychiatry, and psychology (and medicine in general) to the extent that they’ve taken on the biopsychiatry framework. As I discuss in the second link in my comment just above, I’m an advocate of liberation psychology/psychiatry/medicine/social work, and several of the books on my list are in that vein.
Well, Allen Frances did a good job criticizing DSM-5 and acknowledging some of the harm caused by what his team did with DSM-IV. However, he attacks critics of psychiatry for making the same points he himself has made (he’s the one who said “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it,” not Robert Whitaker); and I found his suggestion that a problem is either a “real” disorder or a character flaw (since Binge Eating Disorder is bullshit, those so diagnosed are really just gluttons – yes, he actually wrote that) repugnant. And this made me lose a lot of respect for him.
No – several of the books I recommend are contributions to this field.
They haven’t, though. The diagnoses aren’t valid or reliable. Several of the books in my list cover this in great depth.
I’m a sociologist – my doctorate is in sociology.
I have to go shortly, and I think this is starting to drift away from the topic of the post, so I’ll let you have the last word. Thanks for engaging with me on the subject, despite my first hostile comment (I, too, was tired).
SC, I defer to some extent to your superior knowledge in this. area. However, I disagree with you here and in your review of “Mad Science” that DSM-V diagnoses have NO validity. They do have some. For example, the research by Tom Widger,a psychologist and head of research for DSM-IV, has done a lot of research,good research on personality disorders(see his books on Personality research). I think Mad Science overdoes the biology aspect. Personality Disorders and mental or behavioral disorders are not seen by many of us as illnesses but they are clearly abnormal and Maladaptive,and a discription of the symptoms and behaviors which comprise them can be quite valid. Psychology has a long history of devising psychological tests and making sure they meet tests of reliability and validity(MMPI and more recently The Million Multimodal…) You and Mad Science paint with a very broad brush and don’t see the useful things psychology has produced. Despite your omissions and negative bias I very much appreciate the info at your blog and will read more of what you referenced. I may become a follower. Thanks.
One more thing- regarding validity of mental/behavioral disorders- clearly such disorders as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are clearly defined and usually easily recognized “illnesses. Further, there is an abundance of evidence they have a strong biological and genetic component. You seem to discount even these diagnoses. I realize I have not made a good argument that these diagnoses are valid and I won’t try, but it seems obvious that any knowledgable person would agree with this. Calling the whole field psuedoscientifc and having NO validity is simply wrong. To the extent that validity exists the prevalence studies have some validity. You say that mentioning mental illness with respect to violence is harmful. Maybe it is regardless of the facts. I don’t know.