AGI – The Kongsberg massacre, where a 37-year-old killed five people with bow and arrows, makes news for the number of victims and the suspected radicalization of the author, who had converted to Islam.
The detail that strikes the imagination most is the instrument of offense used but, if you look at the international news, it emerges that the use of ancient or obsolete weapons to kill is far from infrequent.
The reasons are first of all practical. In many countries, getting a firearm is difficult, and killing someone with a knife requires uncommon motivation or enthusiasm.
A bow, a crossbow and even a sword on the one hand they allow to maintain that minimum distance from the victim which reduces the chances of hesitation and on the other hand they are easier to find.
It’s not complicated to go to an amateur shop and come home with one katana.
And in the sporting field the most disparate and ancient weapons are now used. In Germany and Great Britain For some years now, competitions have been organized in which shooting is practiced with reproductions of lance used 300 thousand years ago by Neanderthals to hunt.
The appeal to an ancient weapon, especially when the murderer who chooses her has a complex psychiatric framework, however, he is often the son of cultural suggestions that can range from devotion to history, perhaps of remote nations, to more pop passions, such as those for video games, from Skyrim to Final Fantasy, which allow the user to indulge themselves with a catalog of weapons from all time and space.
The fifty-six year old from Tokyo who, in December 2017, killed his sister, his wife and himself with one katana in a Shinto temple is a decidedly different case from the Syrian citizen who, in August 2019, killed his roommate with a samurai sword in Stuttgart.
The gesture of the former, although execrable, falls within the framework of the sacred, of the ancestral. The second had perhaps not found better or was a banal fan of Tarantino, like perhaps that Berliner who, in June 2008, rushed, dead drunk, with a katana against some policemen.
A katana was also used by two teenagers from Huddersfield, England, who killed a man who had invited them to leave a parking lot last year, hitting him a hundred times. Sometimes the insanity grows hand in hand with the desire for a personal epic and there is nothing that seals an epic like a traditional weapon.
How much the power of the symbol often outweighs the power of the weapon is evident from the not uncommon number of bow and arrow murders reported in the United States, where procuring a pistol or rifle is very easy.
Perhaps, in these cases, it is precisely the wide availability of firearms that pushes some killers to want to measure themselves with a gesture that has aesthetic value and requires expertise. A motivation not far from the growing number of hunters who disdain shooting their prey, preferring to hit them with more traditional tools.
The best balance between practicality and suggestion is undoubtedly offered by crossbow.
Precise, lethal and easy to use, the crossbow completely changed the rules of war in the Middle Ages, allowing even untrained people to respond to a siege and marking the beginning of the end for the cavalry, whose strategic advantage underwent a drastic downsizing.
In fact, inserting ‘crossbow attack’ in a search engine bar produces a fair number of results: from the massacre with three victims that shocked a quiet Bavarian town in 2019 to the increasingly frequent cases recorded in England.
Here the use of the weapon can have a more or less involuntary patriotic reference to one of the founding myths of the history of Albion: the battle of Azincourt of October 25, 1415, when Henry V’s crossbowmen were overwhelmed by an overwhelming French army. numerical superiority. Nuances that are of little interest to coroners who increasingly raise the alarm on the growing number of crossbow murders.
Last April Paul Marks, coroner from Southburn, East Yorkshire, in an interview with the ‘Guardian’ said he was baffled by the lack of limits on the purchase of crossbows, after yet another neighborhood quarrel degenerated into medieval carnage.
Two years ago, a report by the Western Michigan Medical School warned that a total of 18 cases of homicide with crossbow in the medical literature corresponded to 15 episodes in the USA in the last five years alone, suggesting that the phenomenon may be underestimated. .
According to the study, the crossbow “presents specific problems, being intuitive to use, easily accessible and potentially deadly”.
A lesson learned at his own expense yesterday by the knights of Charles I of Albret and today by various unfortunate, anonymous citizens of all those European countries where it is enough to be 18 years old to take home one of these formidable death machines.
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