German Teenage Killer Legally Held Cache of Weapons

ERFURT, Germany (Reuters) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder placed a bouquet of flowers in front of an Erfurt school where 17 people were killed during a short and sorrow-filled visit on Saturday.

Schroeder and his wife Doris stood for a moment of silence in front of the Johann Gutenberg school, where a 19-year-old failed student had shot dead 13 teachers, two pupils and a police officer before killing himself on Friday.

The shock that has gripped country after the attack, which the national media have already started calling ``Germany's September 11,'' was clear to see on Schroeder's saddened face. His wife, the mother of a pre-teen daughter, was close to tears.

The teenage student who committed Germany's worst post-war massacre was a member of a gun club and shot many of his 16 victims in the head from point-blank range, police said.

New details about the end of the ordeal emerged on Saturday. Police said a courageous teacher had pushed the gunman, Robert Steinhaeuser, into a room after a brief encounter in which the 19-year-old former student took off his mask.

``A teacher held him up and locked him into a room. He showed a lot of courage,'' a police spokesman said on Saturday.

German television identified the teacher as Rainer Heise. In an interview with ZDF television, Heise said he grabbed the youth's shirt and tried to talk to him.

``He then pulled off his mask and I said 'Robert?','' Heise said. It was not clear why Steinhaeuser did not shoot the teacher. ``I said go ahead and shoot me but look me in the face.''

Heise said that Steinhaeuser then said: ``That's it for today'' and briefly let down his guard. ``I pushed him into the room and locked the door.'' Steinhaeuser shot himself in the head shortly thereafter.

Steinhaeuser had already shot 40 rounds from a pistol in a 20-minute frenzy of revenge for being expelled. He was also carrying a legally owned pump-action shotgun but did not use it.

The eastern town of Erfurt and the whole of Germany were in shock after the bloodbath, struggling to understand what provoked the massacre.

Police said Steinhaeuser, clad in black and wearing a black mask, had access to enough ammunition to kill hundreds of people.

Photos of Steinhaeuser on the front pages of German newspapers show a pale-faced, short-haired, ordinary-looking young man with a hard stare.

It emerged on Saturday he had licenses for both weapons, and for two others which have not yet been located.

``Many of the victims were killed with headshots, he clearly was a trained marksman,'' said Bernhard Vogel, premier of the state of Thuringia of which Erfurt is the capital.

The killing has prompted Germany to question the wisdom of its gun laws under which 10 million weapons are legally held.

It has also led to calls for tighter rules on violent computer games and videos of the type police found in Steinhaeuser's home.

In a sign the bloodbath may enter into Germany's national election campaign, Edmund Stoiber, conservative challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the September vote, said violent games should be banned.

``What we now urgently need is greater intolerance toward the presentation and glorification of violence,'' Stoiber, whose conservatives lead Schroeder's Social Democrats in opinion polls, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper in an interview.

Shock and fear in Erfurt was compounded on Saturday by uncertainty about whether Steinhaeuser had acted alone.

Police said they believed he had been on his own but were investigating eyewitness accounts of two gunmen rampaging through the school.

``I can't get it into my brain that a single attacker could develop such criminal energy,'' Vogel told a news conference.

Steinhaeuser failed to qualify with the rest of his class to take the rigorous school-leaving examination last year and was forced to repeat the final year. But he was expelled in February for forging absentee excuse notes.

He lived with his mother, a hospital nurse, in a well-kept, four-story apartment building about 10 minutes from school. His parents are separated.

Based on comments from former classmates, teachers and other people who knew Steinhaeuser, it appeared he had carefully planned the assault in advance. Police said they were checking reports he sent a fellow pupil a mobile phone message warning him not to come to school that day.

Police said the gunman shot himself as armed police moved in on him. They also said they had found another 500 bullets stashed in a bathroom that they believed the assailant had planted and planned to use before killing himself.

More than 1,000 people attended somber church ceremonies on a rainy Friday evening, grieving amid the carnage that has made this sleepy medieval town of 197,000 people, 320 kmsouth of Berlin, the scene of one of the worst school slayings.

Hundreds of bunches of flowers brought by mourners were placed at police barricades in front of the school building and the town hall.

``I never thought anything like this could ever happen in a place like Erfurt,'' said Thomas Rethfeldt, 18, whose teacher was shot in the head as she opened the door at the start of the shooting.

``I thought this must be a bad film. I thought this kind of thing only happened in America.''

The scale of the murder, rivaling some of the worst school killings ever, stunned Germans, who long felt they had some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world and were far removed from the type of wanton violence that has haunted the United States.

Robert Steinhaeuser, the teenage student who committed Germany's worst post-war massacre, was a member of a gun club and clinically shot many of his 16 victims in the head, police said April 27, 2002. Steinhaeuser is seen in this undated file photo. (Thueringer Allgemeine Zeitung/Reuters - Handout)

Another Reichstag fire to set the stage for a UN-led disarmament of all civilians worldwide.

"See, we can't even allow tightly controlled posession of arms for 'sporting purposes', because all gun owners are psychotic killers just waiting to snap. Please, won't we do it for the children?"

I too am a very trained marksman, however, I'm sane. In fact, I'm very sane, and this person was NOT. This kid was pushed, pure and simple, and we all know what happens when kids are pushed. Sometimes they push back. The problem with kids, is that sometimes they don't understand that they might be their own worst enemy, or their own problem. They then project that problem on to others, which they believe are somehow victimizing them. The psychology here is simple. Make an example of this kid, and make sure to vilify him as a LEGAL gun owner. When you do that, you've then set the stage for the rest of the world to think that ALL LEGAL gun owners are ready to snap if pushed.

The only snapping I plan to do at any time in my life, is when the rest of the gun owning community decides to snap because of an oppressive Socialist Oligarchaic Government. Watch and wait, you will see the UN spewing their lies and filth in the name of the NWO. One thing about that kid though, Had he had some real direction, he might have been a good soldier. You also have to admit, most of his victims didn't suffer. I'm not defending this kid, I guess I feel bad for him, because someone helped nurture that rage, and then he self-destructed. Just like the kids at Columbine. Interesting no?

``I thought this must be a bad film. I thought this kind of thing only happened in America.''

When we were stationed in Germany during the Columbine Shooting, I remember hearing from some Germans how it was our gun laws, (and basically to make this statement short)our screwed up, immoral (U.S.) society was solely to blame for these "school shootings."

I bet their opinion has changed just a tad now. < /sarcasm>

I can understand this is definitely going to be a "sit up an take notice" moment for the Germans, but to compare it to an event which took a few thousands lives? I have to disagree just a tad, to the "It's Germany's Sept. 11th" remark. In the long run the repercussions from Sept 11th, and a from a school shooting is different monsters altogether.

Nice to know he was a member of a gun club but....WHERE WAS THE DAD? WHERE WAS THE DAD?? WHERE WAS THE DAD??

The conservative party's response of video game banning is plain dumb. Heck I wouldn't vote for them with that kind of response.

While I do not agree that video games cause shootings, I unquestionably do believe that first person shooters do indeed break down the barrier to being able to kill a person.. without question they aid in conditioning. Military studies have proven this repetatively. Pre WWI military trained with bullseyes, in combat they found large numbers hesistated in combat to shoot another man.. so they moved to human shaped targets, and those hesitating in combat dropped... now they use life like targets, and artificial 1st person shooters and now the likelihood of hesitation and thinking about what exactly one is doing in combat situation is smallest it has ever been. It frightens me that such practices are part of childrens lives.

Psychologically conditioning someone to pull a trigger, does not inately make them a killer, but hell if I will sit by and say that this is a good thing.

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