I haven’t seen too many details about this incident, so consider this the first draft.
Earlier today, a 16-year-old walked into Welfen Grammar School in Schongau, a small town in the German state of Bavaria, and started shooting. He was armed with a gun, but the gun jammed before he could shoot anyone.
At that point, the assailant switched to a knife and stabbed two 13-year-old girls before teachers and cops tackled him to the ground. Both girls were hurt badly but are expected to live.
The suspect is a former student of the school and an EU citizen from a country outside of Germany. According to the interior minister, the suspect was already in mental health treatment before he decided today was the day to test whether it was working. Officials are calling it a “mental health emergency” rather than an ideological attack, but I think that remains to be seen. With all the school shootings, both domestic and abroad, we’ve seen in the past few years, I’m not convinced any school shooting anymore isn’t ideological.
Thankfully, the gun jammed. That’s the difference between a headline about two wounded girls and a headline about a bloodbath that leads every newscast in Europe for a week. Because of the gun jamming, two families get to keep their daughters instead of burying them. Germany doesn’t do this dance nearly as often as we do here in the land of the free and the armed-to-the-teeth, but it’s not a stranger to it either.
The name that usually gets attached to German school shootings is Tim Kretschmer. In March 2009, at 17 years old, he walked into his former secondary school in Winnenden, near Stuttgart, and killed fifteen people before turning the gun on himself. Nine of them were students and three were teachers. Three more were just innocent victims who had the misfortune of crossing his path as he tried to flee from police. Winnenden remains the deadliest school shooting in modern German history, and it reshaped the country’s gun laws in ways that are still being argued over today.
Then there’s Sebastian Bosse, who doesn’t get talked about quite as much, probably because he only succeeded in killing himself.
In November 2006, the 18-year-old former student drove to his old school in Emsdetten dressed like he was cosplaying Columbine with a gas mask and trench coat. He opened fire in the schoolyard before moving inside. He wounded somewhere between five and nine people, planted smoke bombs and pipe bombs around the building, and eventually shot himself in a smoke-filled classroom after a standoff that ran over an hour. Investigators later found a suicide note and years of posts on a personal website where he’d been broadcasting his rage in plain sight.
Both Kretschmer and Bosse named notorious killers as their inspiration. For Kretschmer, it was serial killer Ted Bundy, while Bosse was enamored with the Columbine cowards of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
If Kretschmer and Bosse had committed their crimes today, they’d be considered part of the so-called True Crime Community. These are the edgelords and ladies among teens and young adults who not only identify with mass murderers but celebrate them online, and in too many cases, imitate them. Not that this hasn’t been a phenomenon since at least Columbine.
Some of those revered by the TCC are Brenton Tarrant of the Christchurch mosque shootings and Elliot Rodger of the Isla Vista shooting. So as you can imagine, the TCC is full of white supremacists and incels.
So you’ll have to forgive me if I still question whether this was an ideological attack or not.
As always, I’ll post more details as they become available.
(Source)
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