Why We Might Not Stick to Our Guns

By: Brant McLaughlin
Submitted: 2007-05-03 22:25:15
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On April 30^th, 2007, Virginia governor Timothy M. Kaine closed the loophole that had allowed Seung-Hui Cho, a 23 year old Virginia Tech student, to acquire at least one of the guns that he used to murder 32 students and faculty on the campus before committing suicide. Cho had been pronounced a danger to himself by a judge and had been told to seek psychiatric counseling. However, Cho never resisted going before the court, and he was treated as an outpatient for only one overnight stay at a mental ward. He was pronounced of sound enough mind to make rational decisions and sent home by a psychiatrist. Due to these facts, the court’s judgment about Cho was never entered into the state database that it is mandatory for any gunshop owner to check before selling a gun to an individual.

Kaine has said that the database “should include any determination that someone is mentally ill and so dangerous to himself or others as to warrant involuntary treatment,” and issued an executive order making it so.Virginia is already considered by the FBI to have the best background checking system of any state in the US. Nevertheless, there was clearly a loophole that allowed a mentally deranged, dangerous individual to acquire the means to carry out the deadliest shooting by an individual in US history. But some are calling for more than closing a loophole, and want stricter federal gun control measures in the United States in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders and similar mass shootings such as the Columbine High School shooting of 1999, which Cho referenced in videos he taped before he set out on his mystifying rampage. The US is not alone in having a population now debating the “gun culture” that is such a prevalent part of the nation’s character.

Switzerland, another nation of the “gun culture”, where estimates place anywhere from two to four million guns among the population of nearly seven and a half million people, has had a surprisingly widespread cry among many citizens and leaders for stricter gun control measures in the wake of a couple of recent gun-murders (all committed using military-issued guns, which the militia-style army officers in that nation keep in their homes along with up to 50 rounds of ammunition) and, even more, the continuing prevalence of suicide by gun in that nation. The United States hosts the most gun crime of any industrialized nation, while Switzerland experiences virtually none at all—except when it comes to suicides. Then the statistics become alarming. The Swiss have a centuries’ old culture of “a gun in every attic” due to the fact that it has always been felt that the relatively small nation, surrounded by other nations, could quickly be invaded in times of war and the population would need to be able to defend itself on a moment’s notice. Similar to the Minute Man concept installed into the first United States armies, the Swiss have a certain segment of the population that would make up the front lines in war time (all able-bodied males in the nation ages 21-32) but who keep their weapons and ammunition at home. After age 32, males are put into Switzerland’s equivalent of the US National Guard for pretty much the rest of their lives. It is not mandatory for Swiss women to own or know how to shoot guns, but it is heavily encouraged. Now this culture is being called into question by many in Switzerland mainly because of the suicide rate, although the aforementioned murders in recent years don’t help. As rare as they are in that nation, they’re still terrible. There are responses flying in from both sides of the gun control issue in the US, Switzerland, and other industrialized, Western-culture nations such as Australia, as can be seen by a search at Rapid Intelligence’s Factbites.

Gun control is a contentious and heated issued and won’t be resolved easily among nations where the right to bear arms has been a cornerstone of their culture and feeling of well-being.

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