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Gun control: a useless shot in the dark
The fact that 12 of the dead were pupils and teachers at the Albertville School, at which Kretschmer was a former pupil, added to the horror and the speculation. Murderous rampages like this are thankfully rare. Although that fact will be of little comfort to those who lost loved ones and friends in the melee, this should be the one fact to be remembered when the inevitable question - what might have prevented this devastation? - arises.

Two responses to such a tragedy emerged in the British press and blogosphere. The first, rather knee-jerk response is to ask why the authorities don’t control the estimated 10million guns possessed by Germans? The second looks to psychological risk-profiling in order to spot potential teen killers ahead of time. Yet the Kretschmer shootings demonstrate the pointlessness of both responses.

Germany has some of the most onerous gun controls of any country in the world, some passed in response to previous school shootings. Ironically, the German parliament approved tighter gun-control laws on 22 February this year in a move designed to stop the spread of violent crime. The new legislation bans the carrying of replica firearms and so-called airsoft guns as well as knives with a fixed blade of over 12 centimetres.

Previous legislation, passed in April 2008, raised the legal age to obtain a gun licence from 18 to 21. Additional medical and psychological tests were also implemented for under-25s, and pump-action shotguns with pistol-shaped grips were banned. This legislation received a sympathetic hearing after a former pupil injured 11 students at a school in the western town of Emsdetten before turning the gun on himself in 2006. In 2002, a shooting at Gutenberg high school in the town of Erfurt in central Germany came on the day that the country’s parliament approved a new Bill tightening its already strict gun controls. ...