/Diary of anniversaries

february 19: 
A racist murders Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar and Kaloyan Velkov in Hanau – using weapons he legally owns under German law (2020)

In the Hanau attack on 19 February 2020, 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen shot nine people with a migrant background, then his mother and finally himself. These horrific, racially motivated murders of Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar and Kaloyan Velkov, the suffering of their relatives, the partial inaccessibility of the emergency number 110, which has been known since at least 2003, and the failure of the police on the night of the attack have been widely discussed by politicians and society ever since, and rightly so on the anniversary of the attack.
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In my opinion, not enough attention is paid to this: The racist murderer of Hanau committed the murders with three weapons. Two of them were legally in his private possession, one he had borrowed - also legally and officially - from a gun dealer. So on the anniversary of this crime, I also ask myself whether privately owned firearms should be accepted.

Germany prides itself on having restrictive gun laws. Despite this, the number of statistically recorded private owners of firearms in 2020 was 952,148. Tobias Rathjen was a racist arsehole - and on record as mentally ill. He filed delusional criminal charges: he was "bugged, eavesdropped on and filmed through the wall and through the socket". A public health officer diagnosed a psychosis with paranoid contents and recommended immediate hospitalisation in a psychiatric ward. Rathjen resisted, was taken to hospital in handcuffs and released the same evening as "unhealed". He was also investigated by the Essen customs investigation office for drug smuggling. In 2018, Tobias Rathjen threatened a prostitute with violent sex practices and showed her a knife and a gun.
Nevertheless, he had held two gun ownership cards since 2018 and legally bought two pistols. The Hessian weapons authority failed to ask the health authority about his previous illnesses and classified the investigations into drug smuggling as "not usable under administrative law". As a sport shooter, Rathjen was legally allowed to borrow and test another weapon for four weeks in addition to the two weapons in his possession. Barely two weeks before his crime, he borrowed another pistol from a gun dealer with the necessary correct papers. This meant that a man with a psychosis on record and a penchant for violence legally possessed three handguns for the murders he committed.
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It could be argued here that sloppy implementation of a law, as in the case of the racist psycho Rathjen, does not make the law itself worse. Events such as the rampage in Winnenden on 11 March 2009 show that this idea is dangerously wrong when it comes to privately owned firearms. 17-year-old schoolboy Tim Kretschmer shot 15 people and himself with a gun that was legally in his father's possession. In the case of the father, German gun laws were applied correctly.