Posted on 03/12/2009 7:13:16 PM PDT by Graybeard58
Two shooting massacres in Germany and the US this week have reignited the debate on gun control, but while Europe has in the past been been ready to tighten already tough restrictions the US remains more resistant to change.
Germany was in shock yesterday after a teenage gunman shot 15 people near Stuttgart in one of the worst incidents of its kind in the country.
In the US on Tuesday a man went on a shooting spree in Alabama after setting his mother on fire in her house. The 28-year-old, Michael McLendon, killed 10 people including five family members.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the attack marked a "day of sorrow" for the whole country. In the US, where such massacres are all too common, Barack Obama, the president, made no statement.
During the presidential campaign Mr Obama trod a fine line between stressing the need to do more to prevent criminals from obtaining weapons while reassuring gun-loving voters he would respect the sacrosanct second amendment of the constitution, which protects the right to bear arms.
Mrs Merkel said in Berlin: "It is unimaginable that in just seconds, pupils and teachers were killed - it is an appalling crime."
A 17-year-old, clad in combat clothing, entered a school in Winnenden shortly after lessons began and fired indiscriminately, killing nine pupils and three teachers. After fleeing the scene, he killed a passer-by.
Later, two more bystanders, as well as the assailant, were killed after a shoot-out with police.
German media reported that the assailant's father was a member of a shooting club and kept a collection of at least 16 registered weapons in the family home. The attack re-awakened painful memories of a massacre in 2002 at a high school in the eastern city of Erfurt, when 16 people were killed.
The Erfurt attack sparked an unprecedented bout of public soul-searching in Germany and prompted the government to tighten gun ownership laws, by raising the minimum age to buy major firearms from 18 to 21.
A public outcry in 2007 forced Wolfgang Schäuble, interior minister, to drop plans to reverse this higher age limit, which had been proposed to bring German law into harmony with other European Union countries. "Safety comes first," Mr Schäuble said at the time.
The fact that tighter German rules failed to prevent yesterday's killings meant that politicians were unwilling to rule out further restrictions.
But Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy head of Ms Merkel's Christian Democratic Union parliamentary party, told the Financial Times it was "far too early" to talk about a political response.
Despite previous incidents, many Germans remain sceptical of introducing US-style security, including metal detectors and video surveillance into the country's traditionally liberal schooling system.
"The state cannot give a guarantee that nothing like this will happen again," Mr Bosbach said and warned against turning schools into "high-security wings".
Dietrich Oberwittler, a criminologist at a Max Planck law institute, agreed that politicians could do little more to prevent these kinds of attack, noting that state police had executed a specially designed rapid response plan but were not able to arrive soon enough.
"Guns laws are already very strict," he said. "It is extremely hard to recognise these people in advance."
While the Alabama shooting temporarily displaced the economic crisis on US television, gun-control advocates were not confident that it would help Mr Obama engineer any significant changes on gun ownership.
Ladd Everitt, communications director at the Washington-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said the president had shown little interest in pushing Congress to make changes that would outrage the powerful National Rifle Association.
German killings
Feb 2002 Former student at a school in Freising, Bavaria, kills three before taking his own life
April 2002 In Erfurt, eastern Germany, a 19-year-old kills 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman, before killing himself
Nov 2006 An 18-year-old former pupil storms a school in the western town of Emsdetten. He wounds 11 before killing himself
Haha-if you were carrying openly those “green socialist”scumbags would’ve had a mass diarrhea attack
Whole Foods is a joke-it’s the Madoff of food stores-selling rich liberal pukes the same stuff you can get at a regular supermarket for 3 times the price
I know the fish guy where I shop told me he buys his fish at the same exact distributor Whole Foods uses,but his store’s prices are 40% less-that’s because us “ordinary” people shop there and wouldn’t buy overpriced stuff
I guess not even FR is immune from the sort of thought-control we’ll see increase as we move further into a fascist regime fully capable of liberty erasing excesses of the sort Germany saw during the rise of Hitler.
We’re heading into a VERY BAD TIME HERE!
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. DON’T PISS HIM OFF...
Tyranny is just round the corner!
Be Ever Vigilant!
Thanks raptor 29.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
—Rahm Emanuel
Wrong, the lib media restarts debate on gun control.
“You may see another Hitler if you watch this country.”
I wonder if these mass shootings will become Chairman Maobama’s Reichstag fire.
As well they should. We need the debate, for if we had less gun control, more armed citizens would be around to stop these massacres. I say bring on the debate, but the LibDemCommies don't want a debate. They want confiscation.
“But, the media whores never ask where the drug people in Mex are getting full auto weapons up here? “
Oh, everybody knows that you can just walk into any drug store or grocery and buy a case of belt-fed machine guns dirt cheap.
What we need are more gun control laws. Just because any idiot can see they don’t work doesn’t mean that they don’t help us bring the civil disorder that makes it easier to slide closer to leftist totalitarianism.
Freedom is slavery!
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