Fists, knives, and guns

The Badische Zeitung is reporting today on a crime in Bergkamen, near Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen. A 16-year-old 9th-grader who had been suspended from school burst into his classroom yesterday, accompanied by a 14-year-old companion. They were armed with Schreckschusswaffen, gas pistols that look threatening and make a lot of noise when fired, but that don't shoot bullets. In front of the other students, the perpetrators beat the teacher and then fled. They were quickly apprehended.

Since our arrival in Freiburg in late July, we have read numerous newspaper articles about teenagers robbing people on trains, and about teenagers beating up people on and off trains and beating up the good Samaritans who come to the rescue. There have been fatalities in some these beatings, including a tragic case in Munich in late July.

We have read about murders. In the hotel on top of the Blauen, where we comfortably ate french fries and ice cream a few weeks ago, a Swiss man in his 50s was recently stabbed to death by another man in an act of jealousy over a woman. And in a case that drew international attention, a Dresden court recently sentenced a man to life in prison for stabbing a pregnant Muslim woman to death and seriously wounding her husband inside a courtroom last July, when he was on trial for defamation against the woman.

Knives seem to be the weapons of choice for lesser crimes as well. Earlier this fall, a robber held a cashier at knifepoint at one of the Lienhart bakeries in Freiburg; the robber was taken down by a punch to the jaw from master baker Christian Lienhart.

Occasionally we read about school shootings. There was one in Winnenden, Baden-Wuerttemberg, in March 2009, when a 17-year-old killed 15 students and then died in a shootout with police. But attempts by German students to do one another in don't typically involve guns. In mid-September, in Ansbach, Bavaria, a teacher and nine students were seriously injured when an 18-year-old student attacked the school with five Molotov cocktails, a knife, and an axe. Burning schools down also seems to be relatively popular amongst Germany's disenchanted youth, especially when they're drunk. Many people in nearby Merzhausen were shocked recently when two teenagers who set the Hexentalschule on fire in February were sentenced only to 60-120 hours of community service.

My thought reading the newspaper article today was that had the crime happened in the U.S., the weapons would have been guns with bullets, and the teacher and probably a few students would be dead. The homicide rate in the United States is roughly four times that in Germany; the U.S. rate of homicides involving firearms is six times higher than Germany's.

The lower murder rate here can be attributed to a variety of cultural and historical factors, including that Germany has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. That difference makes the idea of staying in Germany permanently quite compelling.