On a peaceful spring morning in 2007, a Korean student named Cho Seung-Hui, armed with two guns, killed 33 people in the dorms and classrooms of the University of Virginia Tech,where he was about to get his degree. The majority of the victims were young students, like him, some were professors. One of them was the survivor of Nazi concentration camps. This rampage, the most violent ever in the United States, shattered the conscience of the nation.
It happened while the Country was debating the outcome of the war in Iraq and the fate of its values of freedom and democracy. And it has re-opened a deep wound: how is it possible to reconcile the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which clearly asserts the right for citizens to be armed, with the change in attitude among a great many citizens, in favor of some sort of control over the nearly unlimited dissemination of all kinds of weapons?
The answer has come from Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, the man who imposed zero tolerance in his city against criminals, who claims to be the only real guarantee that the country will be protected from terrorism and who is running for the 2008 White House election as a Republican. His party has been an old time staunch ally of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which promotes the right to be armed and which asserts the inviolability of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. In May, Giuliani announced, among other things, that he would favor some form of weapons ban (on that occasion he also spoke in favor of the right to an abortion and the right for gay couples to form civil unions) creating a storm within the rank and file of his party. In fact, with his strong and outspoken statements, he was splitting the coalition of the religious right and fiscal conservatives that has dominated the party for the last 25 years, changing the character of the United States of America. If there were more people advocating the right to be armed in recent years, it was partly due to the wave of religiosity that has penetrated the country, searching for the original values of the Republic and in defence of tradition.
Among these is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a well-regulated militia is "necessary to the security of a free State" and prohibits Congress from infringing on "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms". We can guess that the Founding Fathers were legitimately concerned that British forces might try to destabilize the young democratic American experiment. And we can understand the encouragement for keeping a revolutionary force ready to intervene in defence of freedom and independence. But trying to revive the indomitable spirit of the Founding Fathers by allowing all-comers to carry arms in 2007 is a failed proposition. The individual states making up the American federation have a National Guard at their disposal now, armed and dedicated in the first instance to protecting the individual state even from the danger of domestic ganglike mobs. And certainly there is no danger of a British attack in sight. Besides, by now the idea of the militia has warped into an ideology that is anti-federalist and hostile to the central powers which led to another tragic episode, the Oklahoma City bombing. While it may be legitimate to believe that an American has the constitutional right to possess arms, including weapons like hunting rifles for sporting pleasure, it is harder to understand why there are no limitations on gun licenses. Proposals put forward in Congress have been rejected because of heavy lobbying from the NRA; even the simplest, like requiring people who buy firearms to be registered, having a thirty-day period to see if the buyer has a criminal record or banning the purchase of weapons like sub-machine guns and AK47 rifles more useful for war than for sport.
That is why we cannot ignore the connection between these two key developments in the early months of 2007: the Virginia Tech massacre and the revolutionary position of Rudolph Giuliani, who is courageously alienating established longstanding principles of the Republican party. We know that Giuliani will not promote a total ban on firearms, but establishing a position for some kind of control may end up changing the internal debate. We know that stricter regulations will not necessarily keep a lunatic from getting his or her hands on illegal arms to carry out a massacre. And yet, they may. They certainly help to lessen the number of guns in circulation; and to isolate those people in the United States who, disguised as the majority, insist on turning the 21st century into an epic tale of the Wild West.