Student's killing spree exposes US 'gun culture'

America
Student's killing spree exposes US 'gun culture'
By DPA, Apr 18, 2007 - 9:35:26 AM

Washington, April 18 - As the deadliest shooting in US history reopens divisive debate about gun control, police said the university shooter apparently obtained his two pistols legally.

The rampage at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which ended with 32 victims and the gunman dead, has prompted new calls for tighter US gun laws and led to condemnation of US 'gun culture' by foreign observers.

California senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of the centre-left Democratic Party, blamed the killings by a 23-year-old loner on 'the unparalleled ease' with which people can buy firearms in the US.

'I believe this will re-ignite the dormant effort to pass commonsense gun regulations in this nation,' she said.

Recent polls before Monday's killing spree showed that fewer Americans favour stricter gun laws than 10 or 15 years ago, apparently because of a sense of insecurity after the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and a nasty outbreak of urban lawlessness in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Americans still argue passionately about whether gun control curbs crime or hampers law-abiding citizens' right to self-defence.

Most US states regulate weapons lightly. Virginia, the scene of Monday's carnage, requires no weapons permit for gun buyers, though they must pass a criminal background check.

Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean-born permanent US resident identified as the killer, may have falsely said on a firearms purchase form that he was not under psychiatric care, despite receiving anti-depressants.

Gun-control backers have long argued that tighter rules, such as a waiting period for firearms buyers, would cut crime and domestic shootings. 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people,' the other side responds.

Cho, who ended the rampage by killing himself, was a Virginia Tech student with no criminal record. He showed three pieces of identification as required at a gun store in the nearby city of Roanoke, paid $571 and walked out with one of the pistols used in the shootings, a nine-millimetre Glock.

'He was low-key,' storeowner John Markell told CNN.

Virginia Tech itself was the focus of a gun-control wrangle this year when state legislators scuttled an effort to allow firearms on its sprawling campus.

University officials had argued that letting students carry guns would make the campus less secure. Now, gun-rights advocates say the grisly shootings prove the opposite: that only law-abiding citizens with guns, not rules, can stop determined killers.

Some US gun laws were tightened after the 1999 Columbine High School spree, in which 12 Colorado students, a teacher and the two teenage shooters died.

But gun control has little political momentum these days.

Congress, then controlled by President George W. Bush's centre-right Republicans, let a 10-year ban on 19 types of assault weapons expire in 2004.

Bush 'believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said after the Virginia shootings.

All the disputes go back to a 1791 amendment to the US constitution.

'A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,' it says.

Gun-control advocates say the passage is not a blank cheque for individuals to carry firearms and allows for regulation.

The US Supreme Court may soon weigh in for the first time in nearly 70 years, after a lower court in March threw out a 1976 law that gave Washington - the US capital and long a high-crime city - some of the toughest gun controls in the nation.

Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty is fighting the ruling, saying it 'flies in the face of laws that have helped decrease gun violence'.

For Europeans, the Virginia killings once again exposed an ugly, trigger-happy side of the US.

'Non-Americans find it hard to understand a mythology nurtured by many millions of Americans and by powerful political interests,' Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily editorialised.

In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard said that tighter weapons laws and a gun buy-back programme enacted after a 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania had worked.

'We took action to limit the availability of guns, and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the US would never become a negative in our country,' said Howard, one of Bush's staunchest international allies.

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