Update: The student is reported to be 24 years old, Police were tipped to the attack but unfortunately evacuated the location the student attended which was not the place he attacked. Unknown if the shooter was killed by police or by his own hand. Allegedly a matching named social media account is claiming inspiration from an attack in Russia. The shooter is reported to have owned several legal firearms meaning he was licensed, passed a proficiency exam, a medical exam, and had no criminal record. There are about 310,000 licenses and 250,000 have the concealed weapon endorsement on their license. The Czech Republic also has courses for its civilian reservist program, their version of militia.
At Prague University in the Czech Republic a gunman has reportedly killed 15 and wounded 24 in an attack on the campus.
As often as Europe likes to pretend they are immunized from these atrocities by their legal codes, attacks across the continent have proven the falsehood. Do they happen less frequently, yes. At the moment at least. But they have no more effective preventative measures in place there than we do here in the US.
Laws do not and cannot stop a motivated assailant and firearms are common and old technology.
This is being listed as the nation’s largest mass shooting outside of warfare. The shooter is being reported as a student who also apparently killed his father prior to the event. An official timeline is not yet available.
“We always thought that this was a thing that did not concern us. Now it turns out that, unfortunately, our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is emerging here as well,” Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda told Czech Television.
This is the great lie, the mistake constantly made by lower crime and higher affluent regions who believe it cannot happen “here” and that they are above such violence. They are not, the odds are just in favor of lower rates of occurrence as people experiencing a generally high quality of life have problems less often topped by violence as a solution. Violence is a rarer currency in these spaces as functional courts and issued currency rule the day. But that doesn’t mean anything to someone who places value on violence as a solution or an outlet.
It is another reminder that though the 21st Century remains safer than any prior, we are not ‘safe’ and we cannot be allowed to be sold the lie of alleged safety as an absolute by political animals who have no such power or authority over the world to make it so.
