MORE ON THE GERMAN SCHOOL SHOOTING: First, there’s some dispute as to whether it exceeds the toll at Dunblane; apparently some people are counting killers in their casualty totals, and others aren’t. Oh, well. It’s more than Columbine, for sure. Some other reader comments: From Craig Schamp:

I saw your appropriate comment about the shooting in Germany, questioning the value of gun control. Another thing just struck me: Germany has very strict laws against showing violence in video games. I think there are some video games that I’ve played which have a switch to disable “virtual blood” in the game. I’m pretty sure that in Germany, you can’t enable depictions of
blood in a game.

After the Columbine shooting, and at other times, plenty of people in the U.S. have tried to show a causality between shoot-em-up games and violent youth. Seems like an even more specious claim now.

And from another reader:

My fiance is a German national who is still living in Dresden (about an hour and a half from Erfurt). They have very, very strict gun control there. Basically no private ownership of anything but shotguns for hunting. Even the military and police can only carry on duty, and have to leave their firearms locked up at the station when they are not working. However, a delivery driver friend, who is a relatively trustworthy guy, said that even there, where the police are efficient, strict, and mean… he could get a Walther for a few hundred bucks by the next day, if he had to. So there you go… if you outlaw guns, then only criminals will have them.

Yeah, but unlike in many American mass-shootings (including, most recently, the Appalachian School of Law) there won’t be any citizens with guns to bring the event to an end. No doubt John Lott will have a column on this shortly.