A school shooting that took place in Germany yesterday is already being linked to videogames, with politicians in the typically game-unfriendly country pointing fingers at violent media exposure.
Tim Kretschmer dressed himself in black commando garb and opened fire at random at the Albertville-Realschule school in South Germany, killing nine pupils and three teachers, before fleeing the scene. He would later shoot another person near a psychiatric hospital, before hijacking a car and forcing the driver to take him to the nearby town of Wendlingen. Police eventually tracked him down and shot him dead, but not before a gunfight that claimed the lives of two more passers-by, and wounded two police officers.
Germany’s already strict gun laws are being examined in the wake of this shooting, while politicians cluck about violence in the media and look at videogames as a possible cause. The country already has a reputation for banning outright any games that offend their censors, and a lot of material fails to (legally) make it to German gamers without heavy edits. This latest murder spree is not going to help matters at all.
[Thanks, Dexter]
