US gun debate rages on

Bill Clinton says the infant would not have died if new laws had been in place

By Washington correspondent Tom Carver

The pro-gun lobby is fond of saying it is not guns but people who kill.

In some cases that is certainly true. Some people would kill whether they had a knife, a gun or bare hands. But in many other cases, access to a firearm is what triggers the murder.

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That was certainly the case when a six-year-old boy shot dead a girl of the same age in front of their classmates.

He lived with his brother in a chaotic household and found the weapon lying under a bed.

His mother, Tamarla, was pre-occupied with her own troubles. She is a drug addict, she had recently been evicted from her home and had been living elsewhere for the previous fortnight. Her husband, Dedric, was in the county jail.

School fights

In the crumbling clapperboard house in Mount Morris township, drugs and guns were regularly traded and stashed.

No-one noticed the boy stuff the pistol into his trousers and walk to school. At the end of the first lesson he shot his fellow classmate Kayla Rolland dead.

Gun was found under a bed

When his father asked him why he was always getting into fights at school with other kids, he is reputed to have replied: "Because I hate them".

Every parent knows how intense a six-year-old's anger can be but it is hard to believe that he would have killed Kayla if he had not found the semi-automatic pistol under the bed. It is the gun that killed.

Constitutional argument

All this might seem self evident to a European audience but that is the level of the debate on this side of the Atlantic - a debate not about how to remove guns from society but whether or not guns are even to blame.

Kayla died after receiving a single shot in the neck

The right to own a firearm is embedded in the American psyche like a splinter of flint, jagged and immovable.

It all goes back to the Founding Fathers who in 1791 amended the new American constitution with the following words: "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."

This amendment was drawn up by people living in an precarious agrarian society unrecognisable to modern Americans, when communities needed guns to hunt and to protect themselves from Indians and highwaymen.

The gun lobby has plucked out the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" and used it ever since to beat down every serious attempt at gun control in America by claiming a violation of the constitution.

Ludicrous claims

On a chat show this week, I listened to a representative from the Gun Owners of America claiming that if children grow up with guns in the house they get used to them and know how to handle them.

He said that in the old days children used to carry guns to school on the New York subway to take part in shooting competitions.

Such is the power of the gun lobby, and most notably the National Rifle Association, that even the most mild gun legislation, a requirement that all new guns should be fitted with gun locks, has been stalled in Congress for the past year.

President Clinton claimed this week that had this legislation been approved the six-year-old would not have been able to kill. But that is just as ludicrous as the gun lobby's arguments.

How to solve the problem?

The gun the little boy used had been stolen and criminals do not tend to be too interested in keeping the locks on their guns.

Therein lies the biggest problem - how to remove the vast number of guns that are already in circulation in America.

None of the present gun law proposals tackle that - instead they deal with the acquisition of new guns.

The Democrats would like everyone who has a gun to have a licence.

They would like to step up the background checks on gun buyers, but they are not proposing outlawing sawn-off shotguns, semi-automatics, concealed weapons or anything else.

And if even they did, how would the police go about rounding up the arsenals of weapons in American homes? All suggestions gratefully received.