After Winnenden and Alabama

Two terrible tragedies, but two very different responses. In one case, an ordinary, "friendly" 28-year old man went on a deadly rampage with military-style, semi-automatic assault rifles, killing ten people and wounding six before turning the gun on himself. In the other, a 17-year old former pupil from an affluent family near Stuttgart returned to his old school with his father's Beretta 9 mm pistol and killed fifteen people before apparently shooting himself.

In the Alabama case, there has been very little discussion.  For such occurrences happen at regular intervals in the United States.  Very few observers have stepped forward to question the madness of allowing ordinary citizens to own AK-47 assault rifles. In one of the very few commentaries in the national press, the New York Times points out the is no political will whatsoever to combat the culture of guns in America:

In spraying bullets from military-style, semiautomatic assault
rifles, a deranged 28-year-old gunman in Alabama this week killed 10
people and wounded 6 others before fatally shooting himself. In a sane
world, this bloody rampage — the latest in a string of mass homicides,
including the gun massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and
Virginia Tech in 2007 — would at last persuade Congress to reinstate,
in tightened form, the national assault weapons ban that it let expire
in 2004.

The reaction to the Winnenden tragedy has been quite different.  To some extent, this has to do with the young age of the victims, and the fact that this happened in an affluent community (unlike the dirt-poor town in Alabam). But there has been a debate on the effectiveness of firearm restrictions in Germany, which already has some of the strictest gun control laws in Europe.  The father of the young shooter had 15 guns in his house, and the pistol was not under lock and key as required under German regulations.

"What may be more instructive, Karp counters, is how stringent
gun-control
laws have helped reduce rates of gun violence elsewhere. Following the
1996 Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people, Australia banned all
semiautomatic rifles and shotguns and passed strict laws requiring
trigger locks and secure storage of guns in homes. "That is the next
step for Europe," Karp says, noting that such controls could have
prevented Wednesday's killings. "Making that move will be easier in
Europe than in the U.S., because no one in Europe dares pretend they
own a gun for their own defense."

Such a move would be quite impossible in the United States, where guns are considered a fundamental right and the pervasive gun carnage is simply shrugged off as a fact of life in America.

The events in Winnenden have also reignited the debate concerning violent video games.  The teenager was an accomplished player of Counter-Strike and other extremely violent games.  It is know that he had been playing a violent video game the night before the massacre. Now, just days later, the ruling CSU party in Bavaria wants to implement a ban on "killer videos": 

Am kommenden Dienstag will
die bayerische Landesregierung "über gesetzliche Konsequenzen aus dem
Amoklauf von Winnenden beraten". Es soll dabei um ein Verbot von
Killerspielen und um gesetzliche Regelungen zur Aufbewahrung von Waffen
gehen. (Next Tuesday the Bavarian state assembly will advise on "the legal consequences of the Winnenden rampage". The discussion will concern a prohibition of killer games and the regulations concerning the storage of weapons.) 

Whether such restrictions could have prevented the tragedy is debatable.  Certainly, the research into the behavioral effect of violent video games is inconclusive.  But at least in Germany there is a national conversation on the tragedy and a debate on how to prevent such carnage in the future.  In America, such tragedies are as American as apple pie.  Regrettable, yes.  But who can fathom God's will?