The Best Self-defense is Self-defense

The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence.

Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.

As in America, those for whom gun-control laws are written are not volunteering themselves for waiting periods and permit paperwork. German police concede that far more unregistered than registered weapons circulate in the country. An absolutely miniscule percentage of gun-related crimes in Germany are committed with legally registered firearms. Friday’s shooting, however, was one of them.

The gunman, Robert Steinhaeuser, had a license for his weapons. He had no prior criminal record. He satisfied the license requirements for technical knowledge, having belonged to two rifle clubs. Though he did not have a permit to carry the weapons in public (few German citizens do), he did not find this restriction difficult to circumvent.

The expelled student-turned-gunman knew that his path would be virtually unobstructed. He had no reason to expect armed resistance, and, truthfully, even in a free society the school’s occupants would not have been heavily armed. School shootings are still so rare that nobody expects to be attacked. But they ought to be free to respond when it does happen.

As it was, Friday’s survivors exercised the defenses left to them: their fleet feet, and, in the case of a teacher who apparently muscled the gunman into an empty classroom, a refusal to surrender. Calls to police were effective only as a secondary response. Special forces isolated the gunman, where he took no more lives but his own, and for this the police deserve a dignified thank-you. However, the lack of a strong primary response enabled Steinhaeuser to register a ghastly body count.

German Interior Minister Otto Schily noted proudly that the parliament on Friday passed tougher restrictions on the ownership of…air guns. I’m sure the grieving families are solaced by this inspired (and coincidentally timed) action.

Sixteen innocent people said goodbye to their families that morning and never returned home. I have to think that their relatives, replaying the sequence of tragic events in their minds, wonder how the murders could have been prevented. A well-trained, well-armed guard at the school’s entrance might have taken a bullet from the gunman (as did one of the first officers on the scene), but he also could have returned one. Perhaps the security presence would have deterred the attack from happening at all.

A handgun secretly stowed in a teacher’s cabinet could have stopped the carnage. And yet, how many teachers would have risked expulsion for keeping a gun at school? The abrupt and myopic prejudice against firearms—the deep-seated belief that a gun breeds evil through its own volition—prevents guns from being in the right hands at the right times. A society that recognized the individual’s right to protect himself might have permitted a brave teacher or student the means of self-defense against the determined assassin.

A German citizen is prohibited from carrying a gun publicly unless he can prove a current, specific threat against his person. This assumes that all violence is predictable. Shall victims know ahead of time when and how they will encounter danger? Will the German government issue retroactive carrying permits for the teachers killed in the hallways of the Erfurt-Gutenberg High School? Perhaps in the future, criminals will extend the courtesy of waiting for their victims to file the necessary paperwork before striking.

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