Massacre in Winnenden

Off-Topic Off Topic
#1

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5889204.ece

A 17-year-old gunman who went on a shooting spree at his former high school in southern Germany was killed in a shootout with police today, cornered in a supermarket car park after a high-speed chase.

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.

Today’s killings will reawaken that debate. “It is unimaginable that in just seconds, pupils and teachers were killed - it is an appalling crime,” said Angela Merkel, the Chancellor. “This is a day of mourning for the whole of Germany.”

Kretschmer walked calmly into the school at 9.30am and, according to police accounts, began spraying bullets. He was dressed in a black combat uniform but his face was uncovered and he was recognised by teachers and former classmates. One report said that he was using a machine gun.

He then fled the scene, prompting a huge manhunt involving around 1,000 police with dogs and helicopters. Police also stormed his parents’ house in the nearby village of Leutenbach: his father, a businessman, legally owns no fewer than 18 firearms.

After initially fleeing towards the centre of Winnenden, a town of some 28,000 people, the gunman hijacked a Volkswagen Sharan and its occupant and drove at high speed through a police barricade.

He was finally cornered in a parking lot in the town of Meldlingen, about 40km (25 miles) from the school. Police sources said he shot and injured two officers before being shot dead by a third.

Police arrived at the Albertville school minutes after the shooting and found the bodies of nine students, aged 16 and 17, in two classrooms. Three teachers were also killed and a tenth student died later in hospital.

Many others were injured, some of them jumping from the windows of the school during the shooting.

Kretschmer shot dead an employee of a nearby psychiatric hospital as he fled across its grounds, where he hijacked the vehicle. He was said to have killed two bystanders at the parking lot where he was eventually killed.

“He went into the school with a weapon and carried out a bloodbath,” said Erwin Hetger, the regional police chief. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

About 1,000 children attend the school, located in a suburb some 12 miles (20 km) north east of Stuttgart. Kretschmer, a keen table tennis player, graduated last year.

Germany has been shocked by several school shootings in recent years. In 2006, a masked man wearing explosives and brandishing rifles opened fire at a school in the western German town of

Emsdetten, wounding at least 11 people before committing suicide.

In April 2002, Germany suffered its worst school shooting when a gunman killed 17 people, including himself, at a high school in the eastern city of Erfurt. Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, shot and killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a police officer before turning his gun on himself in the Gutenberg high school.

Steinhaeuser, who had been expelled for forging a doctor’s note, was a gun club member licensed to own weapons. The attack led Germany to raise the age for owning recreational firearms from 18 to 21.

This afternoon, seven hours after the shooting, there were still a dozen police vans and ambulances outside the school and armed police on guard as TV crews from around the world set up satellite vans. Dozens of bikes could be seen in their racks on the school’s concrete courtyard, left behind by the students as they fled.

Across the street, families of students caught up in the shooting met in a hall. In light rain, an elderly man stood under an umbrella and stared at the school. “He came from near here,” he said.“Sixteen people. It’s unbelievable.”

Few corrections to the article: He did not speed through a police barricade, he did not use a machine gun, but a single 9mm pistol. Also, before he was cornered in Mendlingen, he shot 2 people inside the car dealer’s, not on the parking lot. When he was wounded in the final shootout, he shot himself, and it happened on a car dealer’s parking lot, not on a supermarket parking lot.

#2

I heard about that, what a shame, may god rest those souls that we have lost.

#3

Where has he got the pistol?
Is the firearm wear legal in GErmany?

#4

The gun was legally registered on his father. Somehow he managed to crack the eight-digit code of the safe were guns and ammo were stored.

#5

Oh now i heard he stoled the dad’s Pistol, that he keept under his pillows in bedroom.
But though, tenageers has killed 16 mans , so he obvioulsy took ammos more then one magazine.
SO i’t seems you tight, he has hacked the dad’s store.
Now we see what might to happend if to let population to own/wear the firearms legally.
Every kid migh to steal the dad’s gun and to kill classmates.

#6

Last thing I read was he had fired about a hundred rounds and he was still carrying approximately the same amount when he shot himself.

#7

Actually, flamethrowerguy, if I’m not misinformed, the pistol that he stole was the only weapon that was not in safely stored by the father, for whatever reason.

IIRC, the father actually safely stored all his weapons (reports range from 12 - 18) except this one. He also didn’t store his ammunition in a safe, so the kid had easy access to it.

#8

Could be, actually infos are changing hourly…

#9

We don’t let people have handguns here, unless they’re police, registered security guards or pistol club members (and there are strong controls on the last).

Some years ago I had a very close involvement with the killer in an intended massacre, which ‘fortunately’ turned out to be a single murder with another person wounded. Apparently the killer took one of his father’s collector pistols.

A few years later a student at a university here killed two people and wounded five more at the start of his intended massacre. He was a licensed pistol club member. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/15/1087244919816.html

I’m in favour of licensing gun owners and guns, but it won’t stop some dangerous people getting through the net.

#10

Very true. Germany has some of the toughest gun laws in the world, and still there’s been a couple of Psychopaths who managed to get a hold of them. It’s impossible to ban weapons completely (as in making sure nobody has any) as there’s always the way through the black market, which allows the real psychos to kill even more effectively.

This might sound a bit cruel, but imagine instead of having used his father’s 9mm pistol which he was able to steal, he managed to obtain an Uzi from the Black Market? This boy, like most people who run Amok, planned his massacre for a long time, and I doubt he would have shied away from using illegal ways to obtain the required weaponry…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely against everybody having more guns than underwear, as it seems to be common in some Southern US states (;)), but I’m also against completely banning them, as it will only hit those who bother to go through the entire legal BS, and not those who plan to use them for illegal purposes anyway. I don’t think there’s been a lot of armed robbers who actually used their legally owned and easily traceable weapons for their crimes.

In fact, allowing the people to have weaponry at least makes it easier to trace the idiots who try to use their own guns for crimes :mrgreen:

#11

In the end, if you’re determined to do some harm you can cause a massive shitload of it for a few bucks and a couple of containers of petrol obtainable at your local friendly petrol (gas) station.

There is a lot to be said for keeping dangerous items out of the hands of dangerous people.

But there is also a lot to be said for not making ordinary people into dangerous people, which is routinely done in every primary and secondary school by a collection of little shits who decide that someone is a target because of their hair colour or some other feature or behaviour and then they spend the next however many years tormenting them. Lord of the Flies applies. And then they’re amazed when, very rarely, one of these wimps or wierdos suddenly gives back in a few seconds all the shit they’ve copped over the years from brutal little shits who got their jollies by picking on anyone who was different to them.

By all means keep these people away from guns, but in many cases it would have been better to keep dangerous and harmful people away from people who were different and harmless, until the really brutal people got at them.

#12

Does my 32 gun collection fit into this category;)? Indecently I was given my first firearm at the age of 10 and bought my first handgun at 15 (paid for it at least, my father had to actually buy it since you must be 21 to buy a handgun in the States) yet I never once when on a shooting rampage. It is sad that whenever a tragedy like this happens people focus on the object people use to commit their heinous acts more than they focus on the people that actually commit them.

#13

Well, the problem is that they think they can change something about the availability of the objects used/things that influenced him. They obviously can’t change him/her anymore, because most of the time s/he’s Dead

#14

It’s probably a natural human response, probably just being part of wanting to believe that we have some control over preventing bad things.

Some lunatic threw his young daughter off a high bridge here recently, which killed her. So now our wise and wonderful government is putting up barriers on the bridge, at huge expense, in case another one in however many million lunatics has the same idea once every thirty years, which is how long the bridge has been open, and isn’t smart enough to overcome the barriers.

The real problem was with whatever went wrong with the bloke who killed his daughter, but we can’t identify that or erect barriers to prevent it so we just put them on the bridge.

Which won’t help when the next lunatic with a similar idea decides that the barriers are an obstacle to what he wants to do so he finds some other method to do it, of which there are so many and most of which the government can’t ban.

Odd thing is that people have been jumping off that bridge for years and killing themselves quite successfully, although it is kept out of the press to avoid encouraging others. As soon as a very sad death, but no more a death than any of the many others there over three decades, gets some press then the government is flat out building barriers to stop more people jumping.

Which just shows that lives don’t matter to governments, but publicity does and being seen to do something about something that the public knows about does, but politicians don’t give a shit about the sad loss of life at the same site otherwise.

BAH! :evil:

#15

Yeah, here in Halifax, we have two major bridges: The MacDonald and the McKay bridge. Both of which are the dream of every suicidal maniac. If the jump doesn’t kill you, the extremely polluted water will :wink:

If there’s ever a killer who wants to get rid of a body (of which, since the recent Gang War, there are plenty), he really just has to throw it over the bridge. By now there must be so many bodies in the harbor, the police wouldn’t know who got killed and who committed suicide :lol:

#16

I heard, in Korea, they keep all (legal) firearms in Shooting ranges, and if you want to take them out, you have to go through police.
Incidentally, Korea has one of the lowest gun crime rates in the world…

#17

True, very true but it really bothers me when something like guns are targeted though. Just like a few years back some wacko drove his car through a kindergarten playground and killed 6 or 7 little kids but no one demanded car proof barriers or the banning of oversized cars. Now if he had gone out and killed one child with a gun there would be outcries that it was all the guns fault and they should be banned to prevent it from ever happening again….maybe I should move to the ‘things that piss me off’ thread…:evil:

Rising Sun was right on when he said

#18

Well, the thing with Guns is that - especially handguns - don’t really serve any other purpose than… well, shooting things/people. A car has an obvious prime usage, and that is transportation of goods and people.
If guns had a secondary use other than shooting, people probably wouldn’t be all over them the way they are.

Also: You can usually be assured that whenever one of the popular subjects is brought up, namely “Weapons Control, Education, Violent Videogames/Media” and “Military Funding”, there’s some Politician trying to make a name for himself.

#19

Sure guns only purpose is shooting things/people but it is the application of the gun that causes crime, not the gun. The original purpose of handguns was to have protection from people and animals trying to cause harm without having to carry your rifle or shotgun everywhere and nearly all legally owned handguns are still bought for this purpose. Just because certain people use an object for evil doesn’t make the object evil. Just as that wacko with the car used it for evil or the 9/11 attackers used commercial airliners for evil. Of course you could still make the very valid argument that the car or airplanes were designed for other uses but let’s say you’re getting attacked by some crack head with a bat or maybe you got on the wrong side of a bear when you were off in the woods and used a handgun to save your life. Is that not a positive application of a handgun, not to mention right along the lines of what it was originally designed for?

#20

I’m pretty positive that, just like the rifle, the handgun was designed by the military - so it’s original application would be to kill people. You can defend your house with a rifle. You can go in the woods with a rifle.

And there’s valid small self-defense weapons available for when you’re in the city, such as Tasers. Why would you want to shoot & kill a crackhead? That would just get you into more trouble, anyway.

I guess my point is simply that while it might be fun to shoot a handgun, and it probably looks a good bit cooler, too, there’s only one purpose they were really made for: To shoot people. For personal defense outside your property, there’s non-lethal weapons with which you can’t hold up a bank or rob someone with as easy as with a pistol.
Rifles on the other hand can be used for property defense and hunting.