Over the last day or so, I’ve been having a civil discussion with a gentleman in Germany about violent crime in the US and how — in his opinion — our lack of gun control contributes to said crime.
He went on to say that Germany’s relatively strict gun control makes violent crime much less common than in the US, particularly in the context of school shootings.
Just today, however, there was a tragic school shooting in Germany. In the gentleman’s own words, the shooting “sure takes some wind out of my sail saying those things happen because there are too many guns…”
Dammit. I hate it when things like this happens.
2 thoughts on “Tragic Irony”
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Public shootings like the those in Alabama and Germany demonstrate the need for law abiding citizens to be able to carry concealed weapons everywhere. In “The Bias Against Guns”, John Lott’s research showed that higher rates of CCW was the biggest deterrent to public shootings because the criminal would be more likely to encounter resistance. “Gun-free” zones are transformed into “target-rich” zones. Not hard to figure out why some scumbag would walk into a school and open fire rather than trying the same thing in a police department. /rant
the alabama shootings really got to me as well. i was telling a friend that even as a journalist, having to see this stuff every day, it still gets to me when someone kills anyone, but especially in such a boorish, unyielding way – and when children and animals are involved, that’s just the worst. gun control or not, the crimes themselves are just alarming.