As you might perhaps come to know today, there's been a school massacre with 16 dead in Germany. As well today there's been another massacre in the United States. (This was not one of the today sadly popular school shootings that are followed by screams against videogames) As German gamer and as Blogger I feel it is my duty to speak to the world about this cruel event and it's consequences.
I want to post a comment about the school massacre in Wenningen near Stuttgart. A seventeen year old pupil killed sixteen people with a gun he stole from his father's bedroom. He started his massacre at the Realschule where a year ago he made his not so good aquisition. ( He went to a profession preparing school after that) He killed teachers and pupils, escaped from the school building, shot passants of a nearby psychatric clinic, kidnapped a car and drove to the next town, killed people that crossed his way and after being wound by the police he shot himself.
It's a tragic event, no doubts. But these school massacres happen from time to time with Littleton in 1999 starting to make school massacres as what we know them today - taking as many as you can with you on your way out of this world.
Littleton inspired many - Erfurt and Emdsdetten in Germany and the shooting in Finland a while ago, for example.
And now comes the politicians and the media. Since 1999 they blame Counter-Strike. First as root of all evil and after finding no scientific study that manifests that theory as major part in doing school massacres. As all of you that read my videogame blog know, videogames are a form of entertainment as movies or books and don't automatically lead to violence. I think it's a form of generational conflict - politics don't understand videogames, never played them, see brutal scenes of games and put them in a totally abstract content. Their interpretation is wrong.
I think it is a shame that the causal research on school massacres made no great proceedings... Well, perhaps you can't say it like that. I study Educational Sciences and had last semester a course named "Gewaltsozialisation männlicher Jugendlicher" free translated "Violence-Sozialisation of Male Teenagers". In this course we talked about videogames and if they can cause violent behaviour. My professor (Dr. Kassis - he is a more or less worldwide known popular expert in the field of violence in schools) doesn't like videogames himself, saying that he couldn't understand how in the world this developed and sees no use in them, but as a scientist he stays rational and is not lead by his personal feelings. And this man thinks, that videogames in the worst case can only be a part that can lead to violence and in worst to school massacres. (He also told us to not use the word "Amok" for school massacres, because an Amok-Run is something affective that is caused by sudden rage and the term school massacre fits better because those are long term planned.) So, I think the science is far better and more realistic on the role that videogames play in school massacre dramas than the politic that is too often determined by too old and conservative politicians that want easy and fast explanations.
In Germany we had sadly many school massacres and since Erfurt the term "Killerspiele"="Killergames" became famous. I can't say often enough how I dislike this word. It suggest an easy to understand monocausal solutions to prevent massacres - the ban of videogames. Sadly it is adopted by the press and the media and every time a pupil does a massacre they blame videogames and want them to be banned. As if this would be the root of the evil. And the term is very unscientific, there's no clear definition which games are so called Killerspiele and which not.
Right now we live in times of a gigantic economical crisis and the German State pumps billions of Euros in insolvent banks and industrial companies. Everyone who likes can have a big piece of the cake, he just has to scream loud enough. They give the money to the ones that created this crisis and the little man has to pay for it through taxes for the next decades. They throw enormous sums of money out of the window not sure if it will help anything.
But to make the link to today's tragic event: The German School and University System gets nothing of this money.
If you are familiar with the PISA study that ranks the European Countries by effectivness and Success of their Educational Systems then you know that Germany has a pretty bad Educational System. Here we have the 4 year long primary school after that lives are decided - if the primary school teacher advises you for the Gymnasium, you are lucky. That's were all the clever German children with more or less rich parents go. There you can make the Abitur and go studying on an University (which isn't free and costs so much that many don't take this route which is a fault in the system as well). The pupils that are not so lucky go to Hauptschule and Realschule. Realschule is okay, you can do a normal job with that. But Hauptschule leads to nothing but poverty and unemployment. It simply doesn't give it's pupils any qualifications they need later on the job market and in Germany good education and qualification is the alpha and omega. So, you see, in very young age it is decided what path a life will take.
If the politic would invest in improving the German School and University Systems, reforming them to be better on international levels (Universities now are in a change from Diplom to Bachelor/Master which makes it much harder for students today than in the past PLUS they are so expensive that much less people study than before) and giving every child a fair chance, making the classes smaller and hiring for every school social educational scientists (street worker? I don't know how this is called in English) and school psychologist, people that listen to worries of children and are able to detect a conspicous case and mean bullies - that would lower the frustration rate. And with less pupils frustrated the rate of school shootings would lower itself automatically.
But if you have money only for the rich that don't know how to manage it right and not for your country's future, the children, if you only cry the same cries after every school shooting and in the end aren't able to change anything, Germany, then school massacres won't stop happening for a long time.
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