Germany moves to outlaw paintball. Yes. Paintball. Date: 2009-05-08 03:41:17
The promising young populist totalitarians who constitute the German government (and that of many other countries) move unanimously to outlaw the past time of paintball, ostensibly because it's only a sport for psychopaths where they can learn to kill people.
You have to know something special about German culture here to get the full picture. In Germany, gun clubs are hugely popular, especially among arch-conservative (to put it mildly) people. Germany has a huge corps of "hunters" that is seemingly necessary to keep the extremely dangerous local wildlife populations in check (hint: they're really just thugs who love to kill things mostly). But neither of these activities gets to be officially related to psychopathic killers. On the other hand, paintball, laser tag and computer games are perceived as barbaric and bloody activities by an increasingly clueless and reactionary public. And I can guarantee you that LARPers will be targeted next (they are people who play out LotR-style adventure games in remote locations with plastic swords and hand-crafted costumes).
What happened here is pretty simple, actually. You see, shooting things with real guns is something that respectable Germans do, so nobody is going to say anything against that. Laser tag and paint ball on the other hand is for geeks and misfits, it definitely has no political cost associated with it when it's forbidden by our increasingly authoritarian regime. Because geeks don't have clout, especially not in Germany.
On a final note, I dare you to visit the government news agency Tagesschau's website, they have an article on the subject, it's in German of course. But one thing you'll notice is the usage of imagery designed to look scary to respectable Germans, especially the first one where they show a black skinned paintball player who's in the process of looking menacing and psychopathic.
You have to know something special about German culture here to get the full picture. In Germany, gun clubs are hugely popular, especially among arch-conservative (to put it mildly) people. Germany has a huge corps of "hunters" that is seemingly necessary to keep the extremely dangerous local wildlife populations in check (hint: they're really just thugs who love to kill things mostly). But neither of these activities gets to be officially related to psychopathic killers. On the other hand, paintball, laser tag and computer games are perceived as barbaric and bloody activities by an increasingly clueless and reactionary public. And I can guarantee you that LARPers will be targeted next (they are people who play out LotR-style adventure games in remote locations with plastic swords and hand-crafted costumes).
What happened here is pretty simple, actually. You see, shooting things with real guns is something that respectable Germans do, so nobody is going to say anything against that. Laser tag and paint ball on the other hand is for geeks and misfits, it definitely has no political cost associated with it when it's forbidden by our increasingly authoritarian regime. Because geeks don't have clout, especially not in Germany.
On a final note, I dare you to visit the government news agency Tagesschau's website, they have an article on the subject, it's in German of course. But one thing you'll notice is the usage of imagery designed to look scary to respectable Germans, especially the first one where they show a black skinned paintball player who's in the process of looking menacing and psychopathic.
Comments
 Helen |
Helen says
(2009-05-08 04:15:37)
|
Just a random thought. No personal agenda at all here.
How's London sound to you? ;-)
Granted, you'd have to deal with the whole surveillance state thing, but at least we still got killer games and laser tag over here!!!