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Tough Gun Laws Fail to Halt German Columbine
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Tough Gun Laws Fail to Halt German Columbine
Germany has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world, but that didn't stop a gunman today from opening fire in an Erfurt school, killing 18 people and wounding six.
In an eerie echo of the U.S.'s own Columbine massacre three years ago, one Erfurt student told the Associated Press: "I heard shooting and thought it was a joke. But then I saw a teacher dead in the hallway in front of Room 209 and a gunman in black carrying a weapon."
How could this have happened in a country where private gun ownership has been virtually outlawed?
After the Columbine massacre, the Christian Science Monitor noted that Germans have long believed their gun laws would protect them from the same type of violence.
Bettina Schubert, a psychologist responsible for "conflict prevention" in Berlin's schools, told the Monitor that strict gun laws and a "more egalitarian socioeconomic climate" made violent crime less of a problem in Germany than in the U.S.
In Germany, there is no legal or historical tradition of citizens bearing arms, she insisted. "In German society, not everybody has a gun. In America anybody can."
One high school principle told the Monitor that "while firearms certainly exist in Germany, it usually requires a 'criminal energy' to get at them."
Meanwhile, in Erfurt, the dead include two pupils, 13 teachers, a school secretary and a police officer, as well as the gunman. http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/4/26/124507
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Germany has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world, but that didn't stop a gunman today from opening fire in an Erfurt school, killing 18 people and wounding six.
In an eerie echo of the U.S.'s own Columbine massacre three years ago, one Erfurt student told the Associated Press: "I heard shooting and thought it was a joke. But then I saw a teacher dead in the hallway in front of Room 209 and a gunman in black carrying a weapon."
How could this have happened in a country where private gun ownership has been virtually outlawed?
After the Columbine massacre, the Christian Science Monitor noted that Germans have long believed their gun laws would protect them from the same type of violence.
Bettina Schubert, a psychologist responsible for "conflict prevention" in Berlin's schools, told the Monitor that strict gun laws and a "more egalitarian socioeconomic climate" made violent crime less of a problem in Germany than in the U.S.
In Germany, there is no legal or historical tradition of citizens bearing arms, she insisted. "In German society, not everybody has a gun. In America anybody can."
One high school principle told the Monitor that "while firearms certainly exist in Germany, it usually requires a 'criminal energy' to get at them."
Meanwhile, in Erfurt, the dead include two pupils, 13 teachers, a school secretary and a police officer, as well as the gunman. http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/4/26/124507
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878