Speak of the devil....

... almost literally.

Björn and I were in the car yesterday morning and were talking about the shooting rampage that had happened in Alabama. I said that things like that were a deciding factor for me to never move back to the States. People can just go out and buy semi-automatic machine guns? And then drive around shooting people. No, thanks.

"I'm so glad things like that are less possible in Germany," I said to Björn.

"Yeah, you saw how they tightened the gun laws in 2002 after that school shooting in Erfurt," he said.

This was about at 10 a.m. yesterday morning, a half hour after a 17 year old began killing kids in a school in the state south of us.

What can you really say in a situation like this that hasn't already been said, if not now, then in 1999 or 2002 or in 2007? All I can do is ask questions, like how could this kid's parents not have realized that something had gone seriously awry with their son? How could they have provided this kid with several softair rifles to play with? How could they have set up a target shooting room in their basement for him? And why in the hell did they have a pistol in their bedroom, not safely locked away like the 15 other guns they had?

Why do people, particularly in the U.S., insist on their right to bear arms? I'm not the first person to say it, but have you ever heard of a drive-by knifing? This is not a topic I can argue about intellegently, because it makes me so angry. As a parent, I cannot imagine sending my child to school, only to have her never return.

What the fuck.