A European view: 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults

oh, yes, let's not question the right to bear arms, any arms, regardless of destructive power... after all, the business of america is business, and there's no bigger business in the world than the u.s. arms and defense industry...

Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America's students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.

[...]

More bleakly terrible is America's annual harvest of gun deaths that are not mass murders: some 14,000 routine killings committed in 2005 with guns, to which must be added 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents (2004 figures). Many of these, especially the suicides, would have happened anyway: but guns make them much easier. Since the killing of John Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century. In 2005 more than 400 children were murdered with guns.

< listens for comments from our elected representatives and hears only crickets chirping >

several readers, writing to germany's der spiegel, capture my thoughts exactly...

franziska müller from mörlenbach

Those who live in a functioning democracy shouldn't need weapons...

stefan schmitt...

It's too bad, that a great country like America has been led astray by its government and a few starry-eyed, foolhardy people.

georg addison...

Every act of violence should be condemned to the fullest. In Iraq dozens of people die every day through acts of terror. Where is the outrage from the US government and the population? In Africa people die from civil war, sickness, thirst and hunger -- where is the outrage from the US citizens? I love the USA, but their president, Mr. Bush has ruined the country's good reputation.

thorsten schnittke...

America has lost touch with reality...

volker lauterbach...

[W]hat constantly astonishes us is the vehemence with which the right to own a gun, even after such a crime, is defended. The arguments that are constantly produced (people, not guns, kill people) disguise the fact that it is people with guns who kill people.

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