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Of private guns and public health

"Are we a nation of gun nuts, or are we just nuts?" went the provocative tagline of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. Pegged on the massacre of 12 students and a teacher by two teenagers in a Colorado high school, the film is a no-nonsense dissection of gun culture in the United States and its contribution to violence, particularly among youth. The 1999 Columbine carnage became the defining event to debate the country's regressive gun laws but political differences prevented the introduction of significant federal gun control measures in its aftermath. Will the mass murder of 32 people in Virginia Tech, including an engineering professor from Tamil Nadu and a young woman student from Mumbai, go beyond merely re-igniting a familiar debate and actually result in strong controls on the procurement of lethal weapons? The motives for the mentally disturbed 23-year old Cho Seung-hui, an English major of South Korean descent, to mow down, more or less at random, his fellow students and professors may not yet be clearly known. But the massacre, one in a long and inglorious chain of U.S. campus killings, focusses attention on the ease with which the mentally unhinged or the criminally minded can procure firearms, kill innocent people, destroy entire families, and wound the psyche of the nation.

When a lone gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian Government acted sensibly to bring in tough gun laws. About 500,000 weapons, including semi-automatics, were seized and destroyed. The outcome was a sharp decline in gun-related murders. It is baffling that the U.S. persists with a gun regime that, as a rule, permits those over 18 to buy guns over the counter from registered dealers against simple computerised background checks. It is true, as Moore points out, that there are other factors — relating to the structure and organisation of society — behind gun-related violence. Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a brilliant and powerful literary evocation of indulged, precocious, and psychologically disturbed boyhood gone horribly wrong to unleash a massacre in an American school gymnasium — with a crossbow. What is clear is that the easy availability of guns vastly increases the risk of exposing defenceless people to nightmare scenarios like Columbine and Virginia Tech. The banefully long-lasting Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which states that the right "to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"), the gun lobby led by the powerful National Rifle Association, and the Republican Party have been stumbling blocks against a sensible firearms policy. Guns are a serious business and no country can afford to entertain romantic, libertarian fantasies about them. The country that claims to spearhead `the global war on terror' seems defenceless against the terror of guns beyond control in ordinary, everyday life. Tragically, the victims are innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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