School shooting in Germany

[C Philip]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7936817.stm

Right after the spree in Alabama, there is another shooting spree in Germany. These are always tragic events, certainly when there are two events so close together. The news articles did not mention what kind of firearm was used, but here is some information about current gun law. I would be interested to know if a student somehow managed to get a hold of a banned firearm, or if it was a legal firearm under German law. Not that it makes a difference to the victims, but if a child can get a hold of a banned weapon that indicates a serious problem.

[Silvanus]

if a child can get a hold of a banned weapon that indicates a serious problem

It would be naive to think that it is NOT easy to get an illegal weapon in Germany, as well as most other places in the world...

But as far as I can tell from the news reports (German TV) the kid used one of his fathers weapons. I think they also seized his entire collection, which is kinda stupid IMO since it was not the father who killed all those people

[TheManHimself]

but if a child can get a hold of a banned weapon that indicates a serious problem.

Yeah. It indicates how futile and idiotic weapons bans are as a crimefighting measure.

[KSFreeman]

Not that it makes a difference to the victims, but if a child can get a hold of a banned weapon that indicates a serious problem.

C, just curious, but what makes you think that banning something makes it unavailable to mad men or criminals?

Children in the UK have pistols. Today and tomorrow "children" in Chicago and Washington D.C., where pistols are banned, will use pistols to commit crimes.

Constitutional law aside, weapons bans are moronic as well as ineffectual.

[C Philip]

C, just curious, but what makes you think that banning something makes it unavailable to mad men or criminals?

Children in the UK have pistols. Today and tomorrow "children" in Chicago and Washington D.C., where pistols are banned, will use pistols to commit crimes.

Constitutional law aside, weapons bans are moronic as well as ineffectual.

That was what I was trying to get at. I hold no illusions that a ban makes it unavailable to criminals, I know that isn't true. What I meant was it's a serious problem if governments ban guns but people (bad guys) get them anyway, because all that does then is take them away from law abiding folks. Furthermore events like this may promote new legislation to ban more guns, but if the gun the shooter had was already banned then it could make some politicians make even tighter gun controls (ie "the bans we have aren't enough, we need more bans" rather than the logical conclusion that bans don't work), again to the determent of the law abiding people. Of course, the real "serious problem" is that someone would kill all those innocent people in the first place, guns aside. Sorry, I should have made my point clearer in the original post but I didn't have much time at the moment to type this all out.

[chris in va]

Further info states his father had a collection of 15 firearms, all were locked up except his 9mm Beretta that was his nightstand gun.

http://fe28.story.media.ac4.yahoo.co..._school_deaths

[SKULLANDCROSSBONES65]

G'day.

....if a child can get a hold of a banned weapon that indicates a serious problem.

This statement is wrong in that the fact that it singles out 'banned' weapons.

The problem starts when somebody decides to take another persons life. the weapon (gun) is only the tool of choice. After all they could use car or even an aeroplane.

The 'child' was 17 years old. How many people here at TFL had their own gun before the age of 18?

[Tom2]

Well I would certainly like to have a bedside arm of some sort in Australia! Saw on the news 'bout a 'roo that broke into a home and went berserk. Apparently even the marsupials are emboldened by the knowledge of civilian disarmament! Seriously though. At one time school shootings did not happen and were unthinkable. Something has changed in modern life in the minds of youth, as one did it, got alot of publicity, and now there are dozens of copycat cases all over the world. Some places they use knives if they cannot get other weapons. What factor is lacking in the upbringing of modern children that even lets this sort of bizarre outrage cross their minds as a serious idea? Some sort of cultural madness? Total loss of fear of any sort of consequences? What!!!?

[Whiteboy67]

The pistol used in the killing was part of the father's collection, authorities said. German gun laws are fairly restrictive and require owners to control access to them. Do you think the gun control issue is taken seriously enough?

Rech said the guns were legally owned by Kretschmer's father who is a member of a gun club.

From an article.

[Ben Towe]

Mass Murderers Agree! Gun Control Works!

[BobH]

Tom2 asks:

Seriously though. At one time school shootings did not happen and were unthinkable. Something has changed in modern life in the minds of youth, as one did it, got alot of publicity, and now there are dozens of copycat cases all over the world. Some places they use knives if they cannot get other weapons. What factor is lacking in the upbringing of modern children that even lets this sort of bizarre outrage cross their minds as a serious idea? Some sort of cultural madness? Total loss of fear of any sort of consequences? What!!!?

This brought to mind a personal memory of one who might have been the first student to take a gun to school and use it. So I did a quick wiki search on the name and found a table of information on wikipedia.com.

List of school-related attacks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

May 4, 1956, Prince George's County, Maryland USA Billy Ray Prevatte, (age) 15, 1 dead, 2 injured - 15-year-old Billy Prevatte shot one teacher dead and injured two others at Maryland Park Junior High School after he had been reprimanded.[15]

This is a matter of record; however, I can insert some personal information about Billy Ray Prevatte because I knew him and had classes with him at a junior high school in NC. He was expelled from the school we attended together because of erratic, destructive, inappropriate, and threatening behavior. His mother (I never heard of a father being present but he might have been) sent him to live with a relative in Prince George's County where he subsequently took what I remember as a .22 rifle to school and committed his mayhem.

We were a community of children of blue-collar, working class and poor parents. Prevatte's peers in NC were suspicious of his behavior and he was mildly ostracized though never made an outcast. He had little physical prowess and participated in no organized sports to my knowledge. He modeled his appearance on the slicked back, duck's tail and pegged pants with raised shirt collar - popular at the time - and he modeled his behavior on the rebel popularized by the media of the time (Brando's biker, Dean's 'causelessness', Pressley's arrant disrespect for moral values, et al). Most of us were typically rebellious in the more normative sense of challenging norms by adapting new styles, but BRP took it to extremes that his peers thought inappropriate. No one was sad to see him go. Virtually every one was surprised that he found the 'moxie' to act as he did in MD, but no one doubted his mental instability.

To summarize then, he was an obviously troubled youth with a history of aberrant behavior. He was influenced to a more extreme degree by popular culture of the times than were his peers. He was from an economically challenged family and was without a stabilizing male influence (but so were countless others). The schools nor the local community knew how to identify, intervene, and attenuate the case although the indicators were clear to even his juvenile peers. I have always suspected that his act was one of desperation and rage against an environment over which he was incapable of effecting any control. It is possible that he was a victim of abuse, but I have no knowledge of it having been the case. Physical punishment was common in that day and abuses were at least as common as they are today.

Remember, too, that this was the first post-war teen population many of whom were raised according to Benjamin Spock. Most of the parents were children of the Great Depression and veterans of WWII. Those were times of the first harbingers of social liberalism and parental duty abdication. The next decade resulted in hippie rebellion and drug abuse tolerance and anarchic behavior acceptance.

I don't know how BPR's life went after the shooting; whether he ever became a productive person or if he is alive or dead. I offer the information as a first-hand observation of one of the early gun-abuse offenders. The gun had no sentient part of the tragedy but the shooter did.

[SKULLANDCROSSBONES65]

G'day BobH. Thank you for your post and the way in witch you expressed your first hand observations.

[B.N.Real]

When a person decides to kill people,he will find a way to kill them.

The place to stop the killing is by convincing people that the pain they are feeling is not exclusive or targeted.

Life is full of pain and misery and hopelessness at times.

But a young man that has no sense of self and sees only the same nightmare coming at him everyday he wakes up,can easily get to this point.

I would prefer that people this far gone either seek and get mental help-

( and we should stop the social dividing away of people that get mental help to help people get more of it)-

or that those people that are fighting this kind of monster inside of themselves actually commit suicide before they kill anyone else.

In almost all of these mass killings,the killer commits suicide at the end of the killings.

If these lost souls would simply kill themselves first,maybe leaving a note saying they were stopping themselves from killing many other people -then their deaths could be looked on as a victory over an evil that was trying to destroy as many lives here as possible.

The people that died at the hands of these mentally sick people are gone -never to return and the holes left in the lives of those who loved them is permanent.

People go after guns because trying to control an inanimate object is way more comfortable to them then then saying,

"That person needed help or to be recognized and stopped before he killied and I did nothing to get him help or to stop him."

We prize strength in societies and view those with mental illness as much weaker than the rest of us.

It's time to realize that people with mental illness need help and spend money and time to treat that instead of stomping on the rights of people to defend themselves and their families against crime.

But there are also people in our societies that simply decide they have the right to kill anyone they want.

And those people need to be taken out of our societies for the rest of their life.

Preferably before they kill anyone.

And I would add one more thing.

Once a person has killed someone else solely because they felt the urge to kill someone,that killer has no right to walk amongst us again.

It is way different for someone to get mental health treatment and stop a killing that might have happened rather than have someone just go out and kill people and maim people and then have doctors say,"Look!He's safe now!"

We must never ever forget the victims of ANY crime and the fact the WE are the only voice they have.

I am still baffled that the guy that shot Reagan,Brady and the Secret Service agent still walks free again in society.

Baffled.

[44 AMP]

Hinckley is confined to St Elizabeth's Hospital (Oct 2008). So he is not free and waking in society, unless that has changed in the past few months.

We can, and do, argue in detail about how we got here. And we debate endlessly trying to understand the "why" people do these things. Few things have shown them selves to be common to the mass shootings of the past couple decades, but most or all of those things are common to nearly all.

The shooters are invariably not well connected to their society. Loners, disgruntled, wierdos, whatever names people choose to call them. They have no empathy for anyone other than themselves. And they see themselves as being somewhere where death is preferable to being as they are. They hurt, and are determined to make us hurt as well, before they go.

In many cases, they are already involved in some form of medical/mental "treatment". The are often on mind/mood altering meds, or have stopped taking them. Sometimes they argument prescriptions with street drugs. Sometimes they are on conflicting prescriptions.

Their actions classify them as insane, because sane people do not do those kinds of things. But they are often apparently rational, within the boundaries of their delusions.

What ever the reason, in their mind, whatever the excuse or the justification they find for their actions, it matters not to their victims. And, outside of satisfying intellectual curiosity, it matters little to me. Few of these mass shooters are taken alive, most dying by their own hand. Just too bad for society that they end with suicide, instead of starting with it.

This may be a result of our fame obsessed culture. I can't say but it seems a reasonable conjecture. These killers know we will obsess over them, long after they are gone, because they have seen us do it time and again. And that may be what they really are after.

Although it doesn't make the US news as often as a gun related killing spree, these things happen around the world, more often than most of us are aware of. Knives, machetes, swords, axes, even clubs and fists or feet are used.

There is a recognised capacity within certain species of mammals for individuals to "run amok". I think humanity is one of those species. Lab testing with different species has also shown a general tendency in mammals that when dirt, noise, overcrowding, etc. reach certain levels, a general mass insanity results. The precise limits are different for different species, and tolerance varies with individuals, but it does happen. Put too many rats in a cage and they eat their young.

Perhaps, what we are seeing with these mass shootings is an indicator that we are reaching that point with humanity. Perhaps the shooters simply have a lower tolerance and go amok easier than the general population?

There is no one (I believe) that has never wished harm on another, at some point or other. But only a tiny fraction of us actually do harm to another, deliberately, with malice aforethought.

But with billions of us walking the earth, even that tiny fraction is a significant number of people. And until they act, they look just like the rest of us.

Finding and helping all the "troubled" individuals, so as to prevent incidents of this kind is a noble ideal. And may even do some good, for some people. But every time someone mentions getting help for these people, I am reminded of the old joke;
"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?"

"Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change!"

No one, and No thing, No law, No counseling, Nothing is going to stop individuals who do these kinds of things because they want to, from making the attempt.

The best we can do is to stop them as soon as possible, and usually, because we follow the law, we fail at that. Sometimes spectacularly.

Our ancestors usually said it in religious terms, something not popular with the mass media of today, but they recognised something which we seem unable to publically admit to ourselves anymore. That evil does exist, and sometimes it walks the earth wearing human skin.

[Gbro]

Excellent post B.N., and BobH,

One of the tragic factors in today's killing spree's is the media coverage. Back in 1967 when a student brought a gun to the school I went to and wounded the person he was targeting and killed the HERO that tried to stop him. That tragedy didn't go around the world on the wire, it probably didn't make it into the next county. Not to much we can do to change that but the press is guilty of passing this virus around.
The scary gun used in Alabama was no more effective than the 9 mil Beretta used in Germany. It is the shooter, The Human gone off the deep end!
I will stand firm that believing in God is the biggest step in stopping this carnage.

[SIGSHR]

In 1982 a South Korean policeman killed 59 people in an 8 hour shooting spree-in a country where guns are strictly controlled.

[THEZACHARIAS]

Id be suprised if the father doesnt get some serious legal action against him just for having an unsecured weapon. The Germans dont mess around with that kind of thing. Given that they even register paintball and airsoft guns, any slipups with real deadly firearms are treated extremely severely. Not the sort of thing you want to go up against in a land where the polizei can legally beat you with minimal reasoning.

[Lavid2002]

But as far as I can tell from the news reports (German TV) the kid used one of his fathers weapons. I think they also seized his entire collection, which is kinda stupid IMO since it was not the father who killed all those people

Dude, fiveteen people just died. Who the hell cares if they commandeer daddys firearms until the investigation is complete. Obviously if this kid (a nut) could get ahold of a firearm and so much ammunition...maybe this guy isnt a responcible gun owner.

Im just saying its a shame fiveteen people just died and the thing you complain about is the confiscation of the firearms in the immediate residence of the murderer,