• English Site
• > World
• > Weapons

Gun Control Debate in the US

America's Weapons, America's Tragedy

By Marc Pitzke in New York

Gun control? Why? Those who want to kill will always find a way, argue the US gun lobby, citing the example of the Erfurt school massacre. Even after the Blacksburg bloodbath, it is very unlikely that America's citizens will disarm -- quite the contrary.

Tragedies often bring out the best in people. That has proven true over and over again in the United States, a country where it often seems that empathy and pathos are always just below the surface. It proved true on Sept. 11, 2001 when hundreds of New Yorkers stood in long lines to donate blood. It proved true after Hurricane Katrina when thousands of volunteers rushed to New Orleans to help the storm's many victims. And it has shown itself again this week as the entire nation embraces a mourning Virginia Tech university.

It was an embrace that took place in both the real and virtual world, with moving gestures and poignant words. "People who have never met you are praying for you," US President George W. Bush told gathered students and faculty on Tuesday, a day after a gunman went on a campus killing spree that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 33 people, including the killer himself.

A wave of solidarity is washing over the country; flags are flying at half mast; television news anchors are wearing ribbons in the Virginia Tech colors; TV stations are playing somber music; on-air therapist "Dr. Phil" McGraw comforts students by satellite; the candle light from the impromptu monument to the victims flickers on screens across the country as the images of the victims are shown. The rituals of consternation and mourning seem familiar to all. Columbine. 9/11. Katrina. And now Virginia Tech.

Questions as to the bloodbath's political and societal context are for now considered taboo. The American media has so far focussed almost entirely on the details of what happened and how. Deeper questions as to why it happened have so far been largely avoided -- except to take a closer look at the psyche of the attacker himself. As is often the case, the attacker this time around, 23-year-old student Cho Seung-Hui, has been identified as a loner -- someone on the fringes of American society.

Slowly though, deeper questions as to the origins of such violent shootings can be heard. The sub-headline of a Tuesday editorial in the Washington Post -- "Virginia Tech's tragedy is America's, too" -- can be read two different ways.

America is suffering. But it is the same America whose historical leitmotif -- the reverence of personal freedom, including the right to possess weapons -- allowed the Blacksburg killer to lay his hands on the guns he used. Cho Seung-Hui used a 9 mm Glock pistol and a .22-caliber Walther handgun, both of which he procured legally.

Where there's a will

"It's been eight years since Columbine. We've done nothing as a country," Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told CBS News on Tuesday evening. "It's been six months since the Amish school shootings. We've done nothing as a country. We need to be asking our elected officials what they can do to prevent people from getting these kinds of high-powered weapons."

It's no wonder that the expression "school shootings" has long become part of the vocabulary of pop culture here. But bans on guns could not stop those who perpetrated the massacres in Erfurt and Dunblane. If someone wants to kill -- so runs the argument of the gun-loving opponents of a ban -- they will always find a way.

The logical conclusion that such Americans then come to is pure Wild West machismo: If criminals have guns, it's better to arm everybody. "All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last ten years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen -- a potential victim -- had a gun," said Larry Pratt of the gun lobby group Gun Owners of America in a press release following the latest shooting. A campus-wide gun ban like the one at Virginia Tech "leaves the nation's schools at the mercy of madmen," he says. In other words: Students should show up for classes packing heat.

It is an ancient and unresolved debate here, whose core is the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution of 1789. The much-misinterpreted text guarantees "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" -- a defensive measure against assaults by the young state on its citizens. That may apply to muskets, but not to AK-47s.