The news from Germany today is brutal in its simplicity. A gunman, a man known to local authorities, walked into a daycare centre in the small town of Rot am See and killed six people, including two children. The details are still emerging but the familiar pattern is already clear: a quiet community, a disturbed individual, and a country wrestling with the aftermath of yet another mass shooting. For those of us in Britain, the reaction is at once horrified and oddly complacent. Our gun laws, among the strictest in the world, are once again being held up as a model for Europe. But can legislation alone inoculate a society against such tragedies? The answer, as ever, is more complicated than politicians would have us believe.
Let me take you to the scene, or as close as we can get through the television footage. The daycare centre is a cheerful building, painted in primary colours, with a small playground visible from the street. Now it is a cordoned-off crime scene, the swings empty, the sandpit undisturbed. Parents gather in clusters, their faces frozen in that particular expression of grief that media cameras have made all too familiar. The gunman, a 28-year-old German national, is dead by his own hand. The police say he had no known extremist links, but a history of mental health issues. It is the same story, retold with different names and places.
In Britain, the response has been swift. Politicians and commentators have pointed to our own gun laws, introduced after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, which banned almost all private handgun ownership. The logic is compelling: fewer guns mean fewer shootings. And the numbers bear this out. The UK has one of the lowest rates of gun homicide in the developed world. But this is not the whole story. Gun violence is a symptom, not the disease. The United States, with its frontier fetish for firearms, is the extreme example. Germany sits somewhere in the middle, with a gun ownership rate higher than ours but lower than America's. Yet it has suffered multiple mass shootings in recent years, from Winnenden in 2009 to Halle in 2019. The common thread is not the legal availability of guns but the isolation of the individuals who use them.
What strikes me, as a society watcher, is the cultural shift that has made such events almost routine. We have become connoisseurs of horror, experts in the aftermath. We know the script: the vigils, the flowers, the politicians promising action. And then the slow drift back to normalcy, until the next tragedy. In Germany, gun laws have been tightened after previous shootings, but the problem persists. The issue is not solely the law but the social fabric. The gunman in Rot am See was described as a loner, a man who had fallen through the cracks of a welfare state that prides itself on catching people. How did he slip through? The answer lies in the quiet despair of modern life, the atomisation of communities, the failure of mental health services that are underfunded everywhere.
For Europe, the lesson from Britain is not simply about banning guns. It is about the kind of society we want to build. The Dunblane massacre did not end gun crime in the UK, but it changed the conversation. It forced us to confront the idea that individual rights must sometimes yield to collective safety. That is a difficult balance, and one that Germany and other European countries have yet to fully strike. In the meantime, the deaths of six people in a daycare centre will be mourned, analysed, and then filed away. Tomorrow, life will resume. The swings will stop swinging. The sandpit will be filled. But the question will remain: how do we stop the next loner from walking into a school, a cinema, a shop? The answer, I suspect, lies not in laws alone but in looking after each other. It is a human cost we have not yet learned to reckon with.
