Another ordinary school. Another teenager with a dark soul and a gun. Another harvest of young corpses. This time it happened in Winnenden, a prosperous town of 28,000 near Stuttgart. On March 11, Tim Kretschmer (17), clad in military garb, marched into the Albertville-Realschule, from which he had graduated last year, and opened fire with a 9mm pistol.
He killed nine students (eight of them female), three women teachers and one person in front of a psychiatric clinic opposite the school, before fleeing with a hostage in a hijacked car. In a shoot-out with police at a Volkswagen dealership 40 km away, he killed two more before shooting himself.
For some time now, Germans haven’t regarded school massacres as a characteristically American crime. In 2002, 17 people were killed at a school in Erfurt in eastern Germany. In Finland, shooting sprees at two different schools in 2007 and 2008 left 20 people dead, including the perpetrators.
Germany has one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the world, says Rainer Wendt, head of the country’s Police Union. Gun-owners must show they can be trusted with weapons, demonstrate their need for them, register them with the police and keep them secure. Gun ownership is relatively high, at around 30 per 100 people, but well below the percentage in the United States (89) and Finland (45), according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. Despite such restrictions, Kretschmer’s parents owned an arsenal of more than a dozen guns, one of which he employed in the killing spree, according to German press reports. His father is a prosperous businessman.
Children who are prone to extreme violence often hint at it beforehand, but if Kretschmer did so, no one picked it up. He is described by officials as “completely inconspicuous” and had entered an apprenticeship programme, an achievement that eludes many disaffected young men. Tragedies like the one in Winnenden can unfortunately strike without warning and perhaps anywhere.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)