A Brief History
On December 19, 2016, Berlin, Germany, was the scene of a horrific mass murder by a frustrated asylum seeker from Tunisia who hijacked a truck and drove it into a crowd of people at a Christmas Market, leaving a dozen dead and scores injured.
Digging Deeper
While firearms are usually given the most attention when it comes to mass murder, the sad fact is that people with murderous intent have shown surprising ingenuity in the employment of alternate means of committing their heinous acts, such as motor vehicles, bombs, edged weapons, poisons, aircraft, and fire.
The perpetrator in the Berlin incident did indeed use a pistol in his crime, shooting and killing the original driver of the truck and dying himself in a shootout with the police four days later. Motivation for the attack was later determined to be an act of Islamic terrorism, as claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Sadly, one of the injured people in the Berlin attack died a few years later as a result of those injuries, becoming the 13th fatality of the attack.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: How can mass murders be prevented?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Combs, Cynthia. Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century. Routledge, 2022.
Seierstad, Åsne and Sarah Death. One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath. Audible Studios, 2016.
