Yet another school shooting, this time in Germany:
Police said that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, killed a total of 16 people, 13 of them at the Albertville technical school in Winnenden, in the suburbs of Stuttgart, before he was himself shot dead. The death toll matches Germany’s worst school shooting, in the eastern city of Erfurt in 2002, which prompted the rewriting of the country’s gun ownership laws.
One of the many ironies at play here is that Germany actively bans the only action that parents can take to protect their children from the risk of being killed at school, homeschooling. Granted, a child’s risk of being shot at school is still statistically low, but if the risk is sufficient to justify passing additional legislative activity, it must also certainly justify keeping your children out of such harm’s way in such a temptingly target-rich environment.