An ISIS connection would be pretty much unimaginable in that case

I mean, if you consider them radical.

and I get it.

How did he get that type of gun, in gun-control Germany? Who supplied it?

How did he learn to shoot it, well enough to kill 8 people and wound many more?

I don't doubt that he was depressed and unbalanced, but he needed help for some of this. Outside of the U.S., guns are hard to get, handguns even more so.

It's just somewhat harder to get a gun legally than it is in the US. But people still manage to get them, and to perpetrate mass shootings, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emsdetten_school_shooting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_school_massacre

And it doesn't take much training at all to use a gun to kill a lot of people in a crowd.

I don't know where people get the idea that this is a solely American problem.

And from a relative. The others don't address the issue.

I would still like to know where the shooter got his weapon, in this case.

Three multiple shootings since 2002 in a country of 80 million hardly proves that guns are easy to get, there.

The U.S. has produced plenty of lone wolf shooters, but only a small percentage were explicitly politically motivated.

a 15 shot clip.

He wasn't that experienced, and apparently loaded it in the bathroom. It doesn't take that much skill to point at someone point blank and pull the trigger, which is why we can train someone for 8 weeks, stick a gun in their hand, and still expect them to win our wars.

We are the armament manufacturer for the world. We manufacture millions of weapons every year and they are everywhere around the world.

Just a note: We have places with restrictive gun laws, and of those Washington DC has some of the most restrictive. The Sureshot(?) Gunshot detection system recorded 39,000 gunshots in an area, about a third of the city, between 2006 and 2013. And freakin' guns are nearly illegal there. You can always get a gun if you want one, and it has been my experience that it is not much harder outside the country anywhere else, if you have a little $.

You cannot legislate morality, and prohibitions are not nearly as strong as what people have in their hearts.

On their own. Furthermore, the other recent shooters and killers in Europe have been discovered to have had accomplices or outside radical influences, so I think this case will ultimately prove to be the same. We will see, assuming the facts are revealed to the public.

Something fishy here

wanted for about 50 years. I have had automatic guns offered to me in bars in Portland.

I sometimes wonder if the truck hit a speed bump and a bunch of folks just fell off.

Unless one wants to be bound by a law, they are mostly meaningless. And most adults know that, but many pretend otherwise.

Ironic - we have had mass shootings for years, now all someone has to do is say a word an instantly the witch-hunters are all over some supposed radical.

The witnesses can't even agree on whether he was shouting "allah akbar" or "I am a German" or "I was bullied".

I think people ought to read the fucking words in the papers -- he was a native born kid with years of mental illness. Just like a couple of our shooters.

...The shooter had received medical treatment for mental issues, a police official said Saturday in a press conference, and investigators are still looking into his mental condition.

He was born and raised in Munich. Before Friday's attack, the teenager had not been known to police. In fact, he had been a victim of "bodily harm" in an incident that involved other young people in 2012 and was the victim of theft in 2011, police said on Saturday.

Yesterday, it was easy to fall into the trap of jumping to conclusions about the shooter's motives.The previous few weeks had seen a spate of terror attacks in France and Germany. There still could be a religious angle that has yet to be discovered, but most of the signs point to a deluded and possibly mentally ill teenager taking his revenge on his tormentors.

But describing someone as Iranian-German struck me as implying someone born in Iran who became a naturalized citizen. Here in Canada, that would be the usual connotation of such a description, at any rate.

According to statistics that I looked up, it is has the 15th highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with about 30 guns per 100 people (as compared with about 88 guns per 100 people in the USA, and about 6 guns per 100 people in the UK). In terms of actual number of guns owned, it actually comes 4th in the world, due to having a relatively large population.

And while gun violence is much lower in Germany than in the USA, it does sometimes happen that the wrong person gets hold of a gun and does something crazy - as tragically happened here.

"Police will also have to find out how the 18-year-old obtained the firearm in a country whose gun control system is described by the U.S. Library of Congress as being "among the most stringent in Europe".

"The investigation is still trying to determine where it came from," Heimberger said, adding that the assailant was not the registered owner of the gun."

Canadian gun ownership is not all that unusual either, but most are hunting rifles. Hand guns are tough to get, for the average person, at least legally. I don't know what the situation is in Germany.

strange.

The Guardian blog has lot of detail:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/jul/22/munich-shooting-police-evacuate-shopping-centre-live

In America, that's called Friday, or any day of the week.

(Though both are very low; where our rate skyrockets is "normal" shootings, though that is currently half of what it was 20 years ago.)

Finland, of all places, has a higher rate per 100k than us.

but the death by gun per capita is highest in the US

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-u-s-gun-deaths-compare-to-other-countries/

http://www.snopes.com/gun-murders-per-100000-residents/