A massacre in the quiet German town of Wolfsburg has left six dead and a nation reeling. At a mother-child centre in the Lower Saxony city, a lone gunman opened fire on a Monday afternoon. Three women and two children were killed instantly, a third child died later in hospital. The attacker, a 42-year-old man with a history of mental instability, turned the weapon on himself as police stormed the building. Sources confirm he legally owned the semi-automatic handgun used in the shooting, a weapon obtained under Germany’s relatively permissive firearms laws.
This horror story, unfolding just days after Britain’s own close call, serves as a stark reminder of what separates us from the continent. In Germany, gun ownership is a constitutional right, albeit regulated. But as this tragedy shows, regulation is not prevention. The attacker passed a background check, his medical records sealed by privacy laws. No one knew he was a bomb waiting to go off.
Across the Channel, the contrast is stark. Last week in Manchester, a man armed with a knife was tackled by unarmed police before he could reach a school playground. He had been planning an attack, documents later revealed. But he had no gun. Because in Britain, he would never have been able to buy one. Our gun laws, among the strictest in the world, are the only barrier between a peaceful afternoon and a bloodbath.
Let’s not mince words. The mass shooting in Wolfsburg could have happened anywhere. It could have been in London, in Birmingham, in Glasgow. It wasn’t. Because the UK doesn’t have a gun culture that puts a firearm in every other home. Since the 1996 Dunblane massacre, we have banned handguns, restricted rifles, and required police permission for every single shotgun. The result? Mass shootings are almost unheard of. The last one was in 2010 in Cumbria, and before that, 1996.
Meanwhile, Germany has had multiple shootings in the past decade. A neo-Nazi shooting in Munich in 2016 killed nine. A gunman in 2019 killed two near a synagogue in Halle. And now, Wolfsburg. Each time, the question is asked: why didn’t the system stop him? Each time, the answer is the same: because the system was never designed to stop him. It was designed to let him buy a gun.
This is not an accident. It is a policy choice. The German gun lobby, funded by the same corporate interests that bankroll the NRA in America, has fought tooth and nail to prevent any meaningful reform. Their argument is that criminals don’t obey laws. But that’s a lie. Criminals do obey laws. They obey the law that says they can buy a gun if they fill in a form. The law that says there’s no national database of gun owners. The law that says mental health checks are optional.
In Britain, we took a different path. After Dunblane, we didn’t just mourn. We acted. We banned handguns. We created a national firearms licensing system. We made it a crime to own a gun without a licence, and a crime to keep it unsecured. We didn’t eliminate gun crime entirely, but we made mass shootings a thing of the past. The proof is in the numbers: in the 25 years since Dunblane, there have been zero mass shootings in the UK. In Germany, there have been 17.
So when you read the headlines from Wolfsburg, remember this: it could have been here. It should have been a warning. The gun lobby will say it was a mental health issue, not a gun issue. They’ll say the attacker was a disturbed individual, not a symptom of a sick society. They’ll say we can’t let the terrorists win by sacrificing our freedoms. But whose freedom? The freedom to buy a weapon designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible? That’s not freedom. That’s a death sentence.
As of tonight, six families in Wolfsburg are planning funerals. Six children are without parents, three parents without children. In Britain, we send our condolences. But we also send a quiet thank you to the MPs who, 25 years ago, had the courage to do what was right. Their decision saved lives today. It will save lives tomorrow. It is a testament to the fact that when we choose policy over profit, when we choose community over gun rights, we choose life.
