The crime of Incheon Birthday: How a father learned to make a gun and explosives through the internet

This Sunday night a crime shocked South Korea. A father in his sixties killed his son at his birthday party using a gun that he made himself following a YouTube video tutorial. South Korea is a country that has very strict regulations about gun acquisition, and you cannot get a weapon easily. Also, the fact that he shot his son in front of his son’s wife and two children makes this case even more dramatic.

The killer not only made weapons, but also made explosives; therefore, several units of the Korean army were deployed there. Now, aside from the circumstances of this case, there is the discussion about how to prevent this from happening again, and honestly, this seems almost impossible to me. Even if we can remove this kind of content from YouTube, I am sure that if someone wants to get this kind of content, they will find it. This is the internet, and for good or for bad, the information is very hard to remove. We can make it more difficult to access it, but it is impossible to eradicate it without destroying what the internet is nowadays. Also, if a killer wanna kill, they can use any kind of weapon to do it; sadly, this is hard to prevent; they can use a Knife, for example, and we cannot ban knives.

However, guns and especially explosives access indeed should be strictly regulated, as a crazy guy can make a massacre, so it is worrying that a person apparently normal can reach that amount and level of weapons. We should find a way to control and reduce this risk, even if that is hard, big internet platforms should do more to prevent this information from being accessible easily.

Source: The Korea Times