So I woke up and was reading the news and saw an article "Government wants to tighten gun laws".
In wake of the recent school shooting in Winneden, where a 17 year-old boy killed 15 people, the government tries to take action in order to prevent further shootings.
The new laws are not yet effective, but the government plans inspections on gun owners' homes (a refusal being illegal), a national gun-owner register, to raise the admission age for competitive marksmen to 18 and finally fun sports like paintball and laserdom will be banned completely (a violation can be fined with up to 5000€), because they simulate killing.
I'm no paintballer myself and I don't know how big the German paintball scene is, but the government is taking it too far this time. Why not raise the admission age to 18 there as well? Makes me wonder when video games are next.
It's very simple actually. It's election time, so they have to do something regarding the recent school shooting. Of course no one wants to touch the real guns that actually kill people, because there are 1.5 million voters registered in hunting and shooting clubs.
So they are looking for a pawn to sacrifice (does this expression exist in English btw?). Computer games have had the blame too often and have a strong lobby by now - paintball however is an obscure hobby with very little support.
But, rest assured paint ball players, nothing is going to happen. This is just elections. Banning paint ball was already on the last administrations agenda - nothing happened. Same here, as soon as the election are over, no one will talk about this anymore.
Yeah I think paintball is less widespread in ger than e.g. in usa. So some "old men" which govern the country look for some easy scapegoat and something which isn't a value in their own lifes. Hope it falls back on them and even older voters see how idiotic the argumentation behind this is.
On May 07 2009 18:27 groro wrote: Yeah I think paintball is less widespread in ger than e.g. in usa. So some "old men" which govern the country look for some easy scapegoat and something which isn't a value in their own lifes. Hope it falls back on them and even older voters see how idiotic the argumentation behind this is.
It´s not only old men, but also women. We must face it, young men are a minority in our country
This is ridiculous, and I hope it´s just one of those overly sensationalist stories the media come up with every so often and not a real consensus among politicians.
On May 07 2009 17:44 poilord wrote: and finally fun sports like paintball and laserdom will be banned completely (a violation can be fined with up to 5000€), because they simulate killing.
They should ban the army too, because I heard that stimulates killing pretty well.
I agree with Zatic though, its not real problem solving that politics should be, its pointless point scoring.
Also "a pawn to sacrifice" does exist in English, except for me it always came with the baggage that it was slightly unwilling, a sacrifice for the greater good, but this is clearly not that, its opportunistic, playing with people's darkest fears, and offering a simple solution to what is clearly a complex social problem.
On May 07 2009 18:32 jhNz wrote: they should ban bread too. over 90% of all terrorists eat bread during the last 24 hours before their strike.
Bear in mind though(haha learned some English expressions from tasteless casts too) that afaik paintball wasn't even a hobby of this school shooter. So they leveled up in finding stupid scapegoats.
EPT
