US Gun Policy

US shooting puts gun control back on the agenda

(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-04-18 08:58

Gun control surged back onto the US agenda after the deadliest school shooting in US history, but with few politicians willing to take up the sensitive issue, chances of major change look remote.

With an estimated 40 percent of American households owning a gun and some 200 million weapons in private hands, according to surveys, challenging the constitutional right to bear arms is potentially a hugely unpopular move.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Tuesday that while President George W. Bush would contribute to the inevitable debate about gun ownership in the wake of Monday's shooting, now was not the time to discuss the issue.

"We understand that there is going to be and there has been an ongoing national discussion, conversation, debate about gun control policy," she told reporters. "We will participate in that but today is not the day."

House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (voting record) said in Washington that lawmakers would discuss the issue but that there were no immediate plans for legislation.

"Yes, there will be discussions -- as there properly ought to be," he said, adding: "I don't want to get into the debate with reference to what we need to do less than 24 hours after this incident has occurred," he told reporters.

Two major advocates of gun control said that while full details of Monday's shooting were not clear, the tragedy still showed how much of a problem gun violence posed in American society.

Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said that while it was still not clear what motivated South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui to go on the rampage, it was simply too easy to get hold of a gun in America.

The mass shootings came almost eight years to the day after two teenage students ran amok in Colorado, at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and themselves on April 20, 1999, and six months after a lone gunman shot dead five girls at an Amish school in Pennsylvania on October 2.

"Since these killings, we've done nothing as a country to end gun violence in our schools and communities," said Helmke. "If anything, we've made it easier to access powerful weapons."

"It is long overdue for us to take some common-sense actions to prevent tragedies like this from continuing to occur," he said.

Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence said that while it was not known whether Cho legally owned a gun, the shooting highlighted how much of a problem gun violence had become, with a spate of recent shootings.

"We still live in a society where gun violence is an overriding concern," he said. "We've had a series of these high profile, very violent shootings that have taken a lot of victims.

"We continue to lose more than 30,000 people every year in this country to gun violence," he said, calling for the introduction of "sensible" gun laws.

"The illegal gun market in this nation is really fed by a number of loopholes in existing laws that allow criminals and children and other prohibited purchasers persistently and easily to get guns," he told AFP.

More than 30 states have yet to close loopholes allowing convicted felons to buy weapons at gun fairs, for example, without background checks, he said.

"It's loopholes like that (which) really feed the illegal gun market and which we should be targeting."

The National Rifle Association, a leading US pro-gun lobby group that says the constitutional right to bear arms extends to individuals, declined to comment on the shooting but offered its condolences to the families of the victims.

Newspapers joined the call for tighter restrictions on gun ownership.

The New York Times called Monday's carnage "another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain."

"What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss."

The New York Daily News called for laws to be tightened, deriding one of the pro-gun lobby's favorite phrases. "Right, sure, guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. We've heard it already," the paper said in an editorial.

"This is insanity, and this must stop. We agree, frankly, that if guns are outlawed, as they say, only outlaws will have guns," it added.