Shooting Spree at Munich Mall: 10 Dead, Shooter German-Iranian

[Teeqoz]

Aura7541 said:

RolStoppable said:

Your argument was bad. Or have you ever heard of an islamic attack where the killer fled the scene only to shoot himself right afterwards? That's why I said that it's probable that the killing spree wasn't an islamic attack, but rather is an amok run because the pattern fits such a crime.

How an attacker goes about his killing spree determines what his motivation can be. Crimes cannot only be analyzed from start to finish, but they can also be tracked back from the end to the start. Just because you don't grasp my thought process doesn't mean that it was illogical.

In my response to you in the other thread I said that one piece of the limited information is that there have been a lot of conflicting eye witness reports. Based on the information that the ninth dead person is probably a killer, I had no reason to believe that Muslim woman for one second. Likewise, the likelyhood that there was more than one shooter was also slim based on the presumable suicide, so I didn't put much stock into the eye witness reports that suggested three killers were at work and instead was leaning towards a single person being the culprit.

Actually, the bolded argument is bad because this is a No True Scotsman fallacy and reinforces my argument that there's no one criteria for what constitutes an Islamic attack. Just because that scenario doesn't typically happen in an Islamic attack doesn't mean it automatically makes it not one. For example, what if the killer commits suicide because he thinks it is more honorable to kill himself than being killed by infidels? Or perhaps after he killed nine people, he has doubts on whether his actions were justified and kills himself in regret. This is why the motivation is more important than the pattern because an Islamic attack can go many different ways even if it doesn't go the way it "typically" does.

First of all, that's not at all what the No True Scotsman fallacy is about. The No True Scotsman fallacy is about adding ad hominem extra requirements to your original argument/point when new evidence arises that proves your original point was wrong. It doesn't have anything to do with the way you define a group, unless you ad-hominem redefine the group when evidence proves your original definition wrong. Since Rol never changed his argument ad-hominem, it isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy. Second of all, Rol didn't say that it was flat out impossible that it was an islamic terror attack, just that it was very unlikely based on the patterns in the attack. Of course you can make statements about the likely motivation based on the pattern of a criminal incident. If a white middle class family are killed in their home, and all the valuables in the house are gone, you can say that it's extremely unlikely that it was a hate crime, and that it most likely was a burglary gone wrong. This is how police actually work when trying to find a profile for possible suspects. Could the hypothetical incident described above be a hate crime? Yes. Is it likely? Hell no. Same applies to this shooting. Based on the pattern in the attack it seemed very unlikely that it was an islamic terror attack.