Recent School Shootings

Recent School Shootings

The recent school massacre turns out to be part of a widespread problem. But not a school massacre in the U.S. As John Lott points out:

At least 9 students and 3 teachers were killed at the public school near Stuttgart Germany. Three other people were killed at other locations.

Unfortunately, the latest German attack is just another in a string of horrible K to 12 public school shootings in that country. In 2002, 16 people were killed at an attack in Erfurt. There were two other smaller multiple victim public school shootings in 2002 alone. In 2006, 11 students were wounded in Emsdetten. Germany has had the two worst multiple victim K to 12 school shootings in the world. The last seven years of Germany school shootings make the United States seem peaceful by comparison: though the US has almost five times as many students as Germany, a total of thirty-seven people were killed during all multiple victim k-12 shootings in the US during the eight years from the Fall of 1997 to the summer of 2005.

Yet, Germany already has some of the strictest gun control laws in Europe and much stricter gun control laws than are being publicly discussed in the United States. It might not get much attention because it doesn't fit the template of gun violence in the US, but during the last seven years, other European countries — including France, Finland, and Switzerland — have experienced multiple-victim shootings. The worst outside of Germany have involved 14 murders, and all these killings have occurred in places where guns were banned.

We all want to take guns away from criminals, but gun control is more likely to disarm potential victims relative to criminals and make crime easier to commit.

A lot of Europeans like to look down their nose at the uncivilized U.S. because of mass murders such as Columbine--but there have been a surprisingly large number of these events in Europe the last few years, in spite of gun control laws that are comparable to or stricter than New York State or Massachusetts. As I mentioned a few months ago, after the second mass murder in Finland involving a mentally ill young man, some of these countries have been aggressively pursing the same mistaken strategy that we have: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.