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German Columbine
By Doug Patton
April 29, 2002

"Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces."
-- Joseph T. Chew

Here we go again. The spirit of Columbine has once more reared its ugly head. This time it is the Germans who have been rocked by the revelation that as long as there are evil or deranged people in the world, they will find a way to get hold of a gun.

Of course, that is not how the savage, senseless murder of thirteen teachers, two students and a policeman by a 19-year-old with a shotgun and a Glock 9mm semi-automatic handgun will be interpreted by those intent on disarming law-abiding private citizens everywhere. No, the spin from those folks will be quite different. It always is, and logic rarely plays a part in their reasoning.

It is noteworthy to watch the media go out of their way to tell us that the assailant was a "gun enthusiast" and an "expert marksman," as if that was important. It has been quite a few years since I qualified as an expert marksman with an M-16 rifle and a .38 caliber revolver on an Air Force Security Police firing range, but as I recall, shooting someone in the head at point-blank range requires very little skill.

Apparently, the two weapons used in this slaughter were legally obtained and possessed, even under Germany's absurdly strict gun control statutes. But then, how could gun control laws even enter into the thinking of a man who has made up his mind to walk into a school and start shooting innocent people before killing himself? Such a person has bigger problems than an illegal weapons possession charge, and it is probably fair to assume that having to obtain a gun on the burgeoning European illegal firearms market would not have deterred him from his bloody mission.

None of that will matter when the drumbeat for more gun laws is heard in legislatures around the world.

The Germans have their own gun-banning liberals, of course, misguided officials not at all unlike our own Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Diane Feinstein. Their agenda has been shared by autocrats the world over since the first primitive firearms forever changed the relationship of people to their governments. Whether they are despicable tyrants truly bent on dominating their people, or well-intentioned crusaders genuinely convinced that gun bans will make us all safer, the goal is the same: to disarm the law-abiding populace.

Toward that end, every spectacular, high-profile gun crime anywhere in the world becomes an excuse for more restrictions. As the world becomes a smaller place, and the idea of a "global community" becomes more palatable to people everywhere, such incidents do not happen in a vacuum.

In France, a disturbed man wielding two Glocks and a .357 Magnum shot dead eight city officials in the Paris suburb of Nanterre - even though his license for the weapons under strict French gun laws had expired - thus prompting French officials to call for further restrictions.

In Switzerland, a man killed fourteen people and himself, apparently over a grudge against a local official. The Swiss government said it planned to tighten gun laws.

Britain, which already had some of the strictest firearms laws in Europe, banned handguns altogether after Thomas Hamilton walked into the Dunblane, Scotland, village primary school in 1996 and shot to death sixteen kindergarteners and their teacher with four licensed handguns.

When that ban took effect in 1997, 160,000 citizens throughout the British Isles voluntarily surrendered their handguns to police. Can anyone possibly imagine that there was a single criminal among them? In fact, a recent report by the Center for Defense Studies at King's College in London found that criminals are now doing what they have always done: using illegal handguns to commit crimes. Imagine that. Criminals are breaking the law.

German gun banners were already hard at work on additional restrictions even before last week's tragedy.

In the United States, those who would violate our Second Amendment rights have tried to use every tragedy from Paducah to Oklahoma City, from Columbine to September 11th to justify their attempts at further gun grabs.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has already called for a worldwide ban on the private possession of handguns. This latest slaughter will only serve to encourage such dangerous ideas.