AP reported a school shooting in Germany yesterday:
WINNENDEN, Germany (AP) — A 17-year-old wielding a Beretta 9 mm pistol burst into classrooms at his former high school Wednesday and gunned down students — some of whom died with their pencils still in hand — in a rampage that ended with 15 dead before he took his own life, authorities said…
And as we learned after Columbine, FUD rolls downhill. There are calls for banning sales of violent video games all over Europe. Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (Entertainment Selfcontrol?) is the German equivalent of our ESRP video game rating and restriction system. The main difference seems to be that the German system is even more restrictive than our own… So, what will they do now? I guess all they really need for this to work is a giant retail chain (*coughWalMartcough*) that will refuse to sell anything with an Adults only sticker… or maybe they should just accept the fact that there are bad apples and bad parents and worse, as has always been throughout history and will continue long into the future. The following people killed in a time when you could enslave the worlds population with an Xbox and a tv… if you could manage to find an outlet to plug it in of course 
June 20, 1913: 30-year-old unemployed teacher Heinz Schmidt from Sülze, indiscriminately shot at students and teachers, causing the death of at least four girls and wounding more than 20 other people, before trying to escape the scene.
May 21, 1924: University students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murder 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Leopold, age 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a “perfect crime” (in this case a kidnapping and murder). Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
June 11, 1964: On the day of his 42nd birthday, Seifert took a flamethrower and lance and entered the schoolyard. After blocking off the main gate with a wooden wedge, he proceeded to kill eight students and two teachers and injure twenty two others, mostly students. He smashed in the windows of the buildings and pointed his flamethrower in the classrooms, setting the classroom on fire, effectively killing ten people. He was then confronted by a teacher, Gertrud Bollenrath, whom he stabbed with the lance. Reportedly throughout the attack, survivors claim that Seifert repeatedly chanted “I am Adolf Hitler the Second!”
August 1, 1966: Charles Whitman, a student at the University of Texas at Austin killed 14 people and wounded 31 others as part of a shooting rampage from the observation deck of the University’s 32-story administrative building. He did this shortly after murdering his wife and mother. He was eventually shot and killed by Austin police.
Not quite the same as kids killing other kids, but they certainly didn’t play video games as children…
