School shooting in Germany

Discussion Open Forum
1

[quote=“CBC”]Police fatally shot a teenager who had entered a high school in southwestern Germany on Wednesday wearing combat gear and opened fire, killing at least 15 people, state officials said.

Police said the 17-year-old gunman, who was reportedly known to police, fled the scene after the shooting rampage and was found about 40 kilometres from the school in Winnenden, northeast of Stuttgart.

The suspect had hijacked a car and taken its driver hostage for part of his escape before being found by police, officials said.

The suspect engaged in a gun battle with police, during which two bystanders were killed and he was fatally shot, said Baden Wuerttemburg Gov. Guenther Oettinger.[/quote]
Why the impulse to go out in a blaze of infamy?

2

[quote=“Jaboney”]
Why the impulse to go out in a blaze of infamy?[/quote]

I don’t know but my prayers go out to the families of the victims. I can’t imagine what the parents are going through while they wait to find out if their child is safe or is one of the victims. :cry:

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Where is this insanity coming from in todays youth? Happened quite a few times in the USA and now in Germany as well.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7936817.stm

Apparently its at least the third time something like this has happened in Germany since 2002.

This guys dad is a prominent businessman the article said and active in the local gun club. The house had lots of weapons. Could it be that a killer/suicidal youth with access to so many guns decided one day to use them ?

Wonder what happened to make him this way.

4

Just read the news. Thought “ah Alabama shooting, more details…” then gulp, no, Germany.
15 dead, mostly women and children.

See the cute little guy on the right getting his table tennis trophy. He is the shooter. Left photo shows him last year.

Dad is rich, has company, nice home, good life. Just he liked to play around with Dad’s guns.

Gun laws are strict in Germany, but when we have a shooter usually his dad is either in a shooting club (in this case) or is a hunter.

Boy liked to fire with a softball gun, friends said, but hey, even I did that when I was young. Boy liked his Dad’s Baretta.

The little shitbag had hundreds of rounds! Must his dad have so many rounds at home? Police moved in quickly as even patrol police men are under orders in that region to go in immediately, so the guy retreated, shot a car sales man and his customer, also someone in a mental hospital and was finally wounded to the leg, not before seriously injuring two police officers.

I have two conclusions:

  1. It is damned difficult to hit someone with a handgun. However, the crazy guys never miss. I guess that must be the devil’s hand.

  2. The crazy guys or guys with problems whatsoever always have guns lying around. I know someone back home who IMO has some form of severe psychological problem, being withdrawn and silent for long time with bursts of anger in between (he was much recovered when I saw him last time though), but of course his dad always had lots of guns at home. Thought: great, everything is prepared for the big run.

Dad was in shooting club as well.

:blah: doesn’t help. No idea what to say.

EDIT: he was a skilled shooter, practicing with paintball gun etc. Perfect family environment, was popular as a kid (see right image, sporty etc.) but later developed psychiatric problems, was in treatment, skipped it.

5

Huh, how can you get a skilled shooter through practice with a paintball / airsoft gun? I have shot both “real” guns and the aforementioned toys in Germany - and it is completely diferent. Skills needed for shooting “real” guns are of no use with the toys - the trajectory is just sooooooo much less flat due to the very low bullet speeds. Basically, with paintball you shoot, see where the balls fly, and correct.

This is almost as rediculous as the claims of many German politicians, that the shooter fired while on the run because he learned this from computer games like Counter Strike or the like.

Funny stuff, our politicians :wink:

Anyway, the father legally had a lot of guns, but for at leats one of them (plus ammo) failed to comply with the VERY strict rules for storing them. By the way, these rules were tightened even more after the last shooting. Effective, huh :wink:

6

Most healthy accomplishments take lots of hard work and perseverance. Successful athlete, musician, artist, student, businessperson, social skills, etc. Except for those who are exceptionally gifted, most people have to work consistently to achieve such goals, and one will fail from time to time along the way – that’s just part of the process – but that’s part of what makes it so gratifying when one is finally skillful and successful.

Guns, on the other hand, give an extraordinary blast and feeling of power immediately to anyone, regardless of how weak, puny, cowardly, pimply, dorky or inept one may be. All you gotta do is pull the trigger and
BLAM!
.

You’ve got the most immense power in your hand, and with just the slightest twitch of your finger you can bring down giants. Or maybe not even giants, maybe just all those scumbags who treated you so poorly and mocked you and rejected you. Or maybe they didn’t even do that, but they think they’re so great and beautiful and successful and just look at them chatting it up all hoity-toity, like they’re something special, and they don’t even care about others who are less fortunate, they don’t even see you, don’t recognize you, and if they didn’t they’d surely spit on you and treat you like dirt.

But, HA, you’ve got that power. With just one tiny twitch you can bring them to their knees, begging for mercy. Not even that, with one tiny twitch you can make their heads explode, send their brains flying in the air. Let’s see who’s so great and beautiful then.

Heck, it’s simple. We’ve all seen a million times on the big screen, the macho dude striding casually up, raising his weapon and BLAM. . . splattered brains. Nothing to it. And if you’ve sat in your dark bedroom by yourself, curtains pulled tight, tired of masturbating to internet porn, and have played a few thousand hours of violent video games, cruising city streets blasting away pimps and whores and old ladies crossing the street and pretty young girls (who wouldn’t give you the time of day), then you’re all ready. All you need is a trenchcoat, a pair of black boots, a few of your dad’s guns (or the ones your mom bought for you cuz she felt badly about you being such a loner/loser) and a few hundred rounds of ammo and you’re ready to go.

Zero to Hero with no training, exercise, dedication, embarassment, humiliation or hard work. Just gather your gear and soon enough everyone will know your name and all those who thought they were better will be reduced to dust. Hooooaaahhhh.

I don’t mean to suggest that all gun owners are weak, cowardly, pimply, inept misfits. Not at all. Seriously, not at all. However, those who do fit that category may sometimes be drawn to guns for the instant immense power that it gives them, when they are otherwise completely powerless over all other aspects of their lives.

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MT, that’s one of the most pithy and relevant posts on this entire subject I’ve ever seen here. Well illustrated too. :bravo:

8

Agree.

9

In deed. MT’s post followed me all day when I read about that guy, like him sitting in a car he hijacked and enjoying his power when saying to the driver “shall I shoot a few other car drivers just for fun?”.

Guns give the average guy God-like power, that’s the key point.
First Mr. Loser-Nobody, then feeling powerful like a God (from their perspective) and then in the media together with the greatest Bad Guys of all times.

This attracts weirdos and writing about it in detail (press) does so even more…

10

Guns have been around for a long time but this stuff never happened before the introduction of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

Can anybody show me ONE example of a school shooter that wasn’t on serotonin re-uptake inhibitors? If you can, I’m sure it will prove the exception to the rule.

Same with non-school related mass shootings. When will we ban serotonin re-uptake inhibitors?

11

What on earth are you on about, Charlie Phillips? Do you have evidence that each of the school shooters so far has been on this class of drugs? Please do elaborate. This is the first I’ve heard of this particular line of thought.

12

Mr/Ms Mother Theresa, despite loving the lucidity of your post, I must wholeheartedly disagree. The analogy that you present is merely Hollywood psychology.
Power is dialectical. Disempowered people need more than a shooting spree to empower them. What’s the point if you know you’re going to die? Only a rushfull suicide.

13

I never really understood that one either. I think it’s just a way of rationalising; making school shooters ‘other’, which is understandable enough I suppose. I always saw teen shooter suicide as a surrender; a denial of the wish to engage with people you despise. Cheesy, but nothing’s as sentimental as the mind of a child…

SSRIs are indeed routinely misprescribed to people with behavioural/personality problems and to people who are sad or abused or have emotional problems, particularly older teens and people in their early twenties. They are also appropriately prescribed to many people with depression and obsessive disorders. However, you don’t get ‘serotonin poisoning’ from taking the drugs when there is not a problem with your reuptake. I’m not a chemist, but a doctor explained to me that the brain just gets rid of what’s not needed.

Depressed people can be a danger to themselves (1 in 10 people with clinical depression successfully commit suicide, most of them are male) and to a lesser extent, to others, although they tend to attack/abuse/kill their family rather than strangers. Although there is correlatory (is that a word?)evidence that SSRIs increase aggression in some people, it would be pretty hard to establish a causal link in individual cases.
SSRIs are ‘dangerous’ because depression makes you very tired and takes away the will/focus/energy to hurt yourself or anyone else. Depressives are far more dangerous when they are in recovery than when they are very ill because they have the clarity to act. This energy (the six weeks in kickstart you get from this class of drug) is what allows depressives to make changes in their lives, get into new routines and patterns, and strengthen relationships. Sadly, for others, it gives them the strength to jump or to shoot. However ‘banning’ them would kill far more people.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that more mentally ill people kill more often than people who aren’t being treated for mental illness.

Edit I’m writing this so that people that need them aren’t ‘afraid’ of SSRI drugs, and that if your children need them, making them go through their adolescence in severe psychological pain is far more dangerous than getting them meds. I don’t mean to say anything bad, and I’m so sorry for their poor families.

14

You suppose? They are “other,” aren’t they? Sure, in sense they aren’t other: like all of us, they are human beings worthy of empathy, understanding and compassion, and they may (or may not) be the victim of abuse, neglect and/or serious chemical imbalances over which they may have little control. But, very few people stock up on weapons and go on suicidal shooting rampages in schools or shopping malls, killing as many perfectly innocent, random people as possible, do they? Doesn’t that make them slightly unusual, slightly “other”?

Nah, that’s totally inaccurate. Storming a school with an arsenal and blasting away at scores of random innocents is not “surrender”, it’s not “denial of the wish to engage.” It’s a brutal assault. Your description makes it sound weak, meek, passive, like a shrinking violet retreating to ones room, locking out the world and wasting away alone. These guys aren’t surrendering; they’re striking out at their frustrations and all that bothers them, rationally or not, figuring if they can’t be happy no one can be. It’s not surrender; it’s attack. It’s not denial of engagement; it’s direct engagement.

15

That’s an emotional rather than analytic response, Mr Theresa. :eh:

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Huh? :eh:

Do you consider it “surrender” or “denial of engagement” to storm a school with a couple of uzis and a bag full of ammo and take out a dozen random students and teachers before blowing ones brains out? I guess we use different dictionaries.

17

[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Huh? :eh:

Do you consider it “surrender” or “denial of engagement” to storm a school with a couple of uzis and a bag full of ammo and take out a dozen random students and teachers before blowing ones brains out? I guess we use different dictionaries.[/quote]
Irellevant. The fact that these things are occurring with alarming regularity is certainly a cause for immense concern. Getting angry and crying “Oh! What about the children?” is an unhelpful response. Emotionally charged diatribes are not going to help us understand nor change the situation.

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[quote=“jimipresley”][quote=“Mother Theresa”]Huh? :eh:

Do you consider it “surrender” or “denial of engagement” to storm a school with a couple of uzis and a bag full of ammo and take out a dozen random students and teachers before blowing ones brains out? I guess we use different dictionaries.[/quote]
Irellevant. The fact that these things are occurring with alarming regularity is certainly a cause for immense concern. Getting angry and crying “Oh! What about the children?” is an unhelpful response. Emotionally charged diatribes are not going to help us understand nor change the situation.[/quote]

HUH? :eh:

Do you speak English, too, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Me, getting emotional and crying “oh, what about the children”? Where the hell did you get that?

I was simply saying storming a school on a blazing, bloody rampage is an assault, an attack, an invasion, a direct form of engagement, as opposed to a “surrender” or “denial of engagement.”

Do you agree with that last statement?

19

Quoted from another thread

I couldn’t possibly give a better answer than the one offered by MT in this thread.[/quote]

Guns…give an extraordinary blast and feeling of power immediately to anyone, regardless of how weak, puny, cowardly, pimply, dorky or inept one may be. All you gotta do is pull the trigger and
BLAM!
.

You’ve got the most immense power in your hand, and with just the slightest twitch of your finger you can bring down giants. Or maybe not even giants, maybe just all those scumbags who treated you so poorly and mocked you and rejected you. Or maybe they didn’t even do that, but they think they’re so great and beautiful and successful and just look at them chatting it up all hoity-toity, like they’re something special, and they don’t even care about others who are less fortunate, they don’t even see you, don’t recognize you, and if they didn’t they’d surely spit on you and treat you like dirt. …Zero to Hero with no training, exercise, dedication, embarassment, humiliation or hard work. Just gather your gear and soon enough everyone will know your name and all those who thought they were better will be reduced to dust…I don’t mean to suggest that all gun owners are weak, cowardly, pimply, inept misfits. Not at all. Seriously, not at all. However, those who do fit that category may sometimes be drawn to guns for the instant immense power that it gives them, when they are otherwise completely powerless over all other aspects of their lives.[/quote]

But there’s something missing from that explanation. What distinguishes between the average pimply, powerless misfit (probably half the posters here, when we were teens), and the ones who pick up that gun?

One is the easy availability of guns, of course, but I’m referring to personal factors. Is it the instilling by parents of a sense of responsibility in their kids? A sense that they are unconditionally loved, and worthwhile? An understanding that training, exercise, dedication and so on are rewarded too? Some other values? Or a sense of meaning or purpose in one’s life, such as religion provides for some?

20

I’m just looking for evidence of any school shooters who weren’t on anti-depressants. I haven’t found one yet.

A quick google search gave me these who were: ssristories.com/index.php

It’s quite a well known theory but never reported upon except by ‘conspiracy’ theorists. But it seems to me that every time an event like this happens, the kid is on ssri’s and is walking around as if he’s in a video game. Many patients refer to this feeling of being removed from reality and walking around in a virtual world. Violent and suicidal thoughts are black box warnings written on the pack.

Prescribing a pill is so much easier than dealing with a problem. The kids would probably benefit more from a hug and some positive reinforcement but that might be misconstrued as child abuse these days and it’s time consuming as well.

Can anyone give me an example of a school shooter who wasn’t on anti-depressant drugs?