Uncomfortably close...

from The Guardian

"The lone gunman who killed nine people and wounded a further 21 at a shopping center in Munich before shooting himself was an 18-year-old German of Iranian descent, police have said. In the third attack on civilians in Europe in eight days, Germany’s third largest city went into lockdown after the teenager opened fire on diners in a McDonald’s restaurant before moving to a nearby shopping mall.Police stopped trains, buses and trams, closed highways to private cars and ordered citizens to stay in their homes as they searched for suspected killers, as false rumours of fresh attacks sent panic through the city. While the city was in lockdown and armed elite police poised on rooftops at locations around Munich, some older Germans were forced to recall the days when the country was terrorised by urban guerilla movement the Baader-Meinhof gang or Red Army Faction (RAF), and the terror attack on the 1972 Olympic Games."

The first I knew of the incident was when I returned from an early evening shopping outing and found a Skype message timed at 19:38hrs from Jessi. She was on a bus, on her way from Berlin for a weekend in Frankfurt.

I felt no compunction to turn on any rolling news channel. Am I inured to this kind of thing? I fear we will all begin to see such events as belonging to a 'new normal', with the constant sense of foreboding amplified by the hysterics of social media.