It's in the north, not central but inside the city proper and not that far from downtown either. Maybe 4 KM away from Marienplatz?
And it's a pretty popular shopping mall.
It's a bit further than that; it's the endpoint of U1.
Used to be where I did most of my shopping.
Well I have a wild guess on that one.
I think this is a useful jumping off point for discussing the "let's not jump to conclusions" v "you're just trying to be politically correct" argument which seems to underpin the disagreement in this thread. I think the issue is trying to push this into a narrative, and trying to avoid pushing it into a narrative.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this attack was carried out by a German mit Migrationshintergrund, maybe Turkish, angry at anti-foreigner sentiment in Germany. Now, this relates to immigration & German culture. One the one hand, this could be said to follow a similar pattern as was seen with the Nice attack in France - a foreigner attacking locals over culture. But that would be a deeply misleading comparison. North African immigration to France and Turkish immigration to Germany are wildly different. There is a particular French characteristic to the Nice attack, and in this hypothetical, there's a particular German characteristic to the Munich attack. So what benefit is derived from jamming the two events into the one overarching 'terrorism is everywhere' narrative? It really only seems to create a sense of apocalyptic panic, when you've got very distinct characteristics in play. That broad and misleading narrative is reinforced, as more events are seen through that lens, with their unique characteristics being parsed out in order to force a fit into the narrative, preventing proper analysis of each event.
So when people say that we should not just jump to conclusions, it's not saying that we shouldn't perhaps expect as a matter of percentages that terrorist attacks carried out in Europe do have some sort of link to Islamic extremism, in the same way that there might have been an expectation in previous decades that a German attack would have some sort of link to the RAF. Rather, it's saying that we shouldn't be so quick to disengage our brains from an examination of the particularities of individual attacks in our rush to fit each individual incident into a broad and hugely generalising narrative which only really serves to create fear and magnify a threat.
Its either right wing nut jobs or muslim extremists, I think it can be narrowed down to those two fairly easily.
Those really aren't the only options, though, but I suspect it's assumed they are because we're living in a time where people immediately jump to 'terrorism', being a term defined by political extremes, rather than actions.
I've read some comments that 'maybe this isn't terrorism', and I'm not actually sure what that means. I think it's meant to mean that maybe it isn't an attack animated by either Islamic extremism or neo-Nazism, but then why would an attack have to be animated by those particular forms of political ideology in order to qualify as 'terrorism'? Probably because, in our current discourse, such an inextricable semantic link has been created.
If, for example, this is an attack carried out by a disaffected German youth of Turkish extraction, that doesn't suddenly mean it's not 'terrorism'. But it does mean that it isn't terrorism of an identical variety to any other terrorist attack we've seen of recent times.
