The Long Island train shootings and gun control - 10 December 1993

If you were challenged by that famously inquisitive man from Mars, to say what sorts of television programmes are most readily available on the now 72 channels that I can punch up every evening, I'd say quickly and truthfully, police dramas, programmes on Aids and programmes on violence.

You'll notice I make a distinction between police dramas and programmes on violence because, though the police dramas are going to contain violence, the other programmes I have in mind are either discussions by sociologists, police commissioners, social workers etc on violence in society, especially on the streets and in the schools or are documentaries or live interview shows, out on the streets. Quite a lot of them because the streets are the centre of life for too many of the teenagers of America.

Not the home, the school, the sports field, the movies – the streets are where, as they say, the action is and where youngsters, the males especially, prove the qualities they admire most. Not anything as sharply defined as machismo, which social historians tell us is, in Latin countries, the posture that freezes the free flow between men and women of ideas, of rights, of manners. But on the street, it comes out from a flock of television interviews I've been watching, the street is where you show defiance of the fuzz, the cops, of the neighbouring gang and show initiative, ingenuity in evading the law, ruthless courage in robbing a store, mugging an old lady. Most of all, if you're a little older and a big shot, you back up your courage with a gun.

Last Tuesday evening, you'll have heard, a man produced a 9mm handgun on a placid Long Island commuter train and marched along the aisle, spraying shots around a half circle line of fire. When he'd exhausted the first 15 shot clip, he reloaded and exhausted another round. At that point a man, who was not one of the dead or dying or bleeding or hiding, jumped on him and with two others, managed to overpower him before he could get his hands into a canvas bag he'd been carrying, which contained dozens of extra rounds. As it was, five killed, 18 wounded before they got him. The arrested suspect is a black man, who made no bones about motive. The police found a pack of notes in his pocket, outlining a plan to express his rage against the governor of New York State, against whites and Asians in general and in particular against Uncle Tom Negroes. Interesting he used that long-forsaken word.

After the recent passage if the so-called Brady Bill, the newspapers rushed to congratulate the Congress on having at last done something to arrest the random explosions of guns around the country. But I'm afraid there's no lesson to be drawn from the appalling Long Island train incident. You'll recall that the Brady Bill which is of course to be a federal, a national law, requites anyone wanting to buy a gun to wait five days while a background check is done on them. Now this will only be possible by about 1996 to cover 255 million people across 3,000 miles.

What would the Brady Bill have done to the man who ran amok on Tuesday evening? Nothing. He planned the plot very carefully. He even, for a reason not yet explained, went off 3,000 miles to Los Angeles to buy his gun. California has a law stricter than the Brady Bill, you wait 15 days, not five. This man, black man, resident of Brooklyn, went into a store out there nine months ago. He gave his true name, confirmed it with a California driver's licence, with an address that turned out to be of the motel he stayed in. He swore, as California requires you to do, that he had never committed a felony. Never had a history of mental disease. He then went away, came back on the 16th day, picked up his gun and if it was ever used between then and last Tuesday evening, he's the only one who knows about it.

Coming on the heels of the Brady Bill and the quiet self-congratulation of the Congress, this sorry story throws a very garish light on the pitiable limitations of the bill. One of the owners of the store where the gun was bought, said he'd followed all the required regulations, but it proves that the waiting period is a joke. The Brady Bill is a joke. The president of a group that has most prominently lobbied for the bill conceded: we always said the Brady Bill was a first step only. President Clinton took it up several times in public, on Wednesday bemoaning the incident, of course, but saying it would give an impetus to deal urgently with the problems, he didn't say this time of gun control, but of gun violence in this country.

Certainly it has now robbed the members of Congress, as they head for home for Christmas, of the old familiar slogans that protected them from the usual voters' questions: what have you done for me lately? I doubt that the National Rifle Association can go on much longer resting with folded arms behind its slogan – guns don't kill people, people kill people. The senior senator from New York, Senator Moynihan, has been improving his riposte to that old line by chanting, no, bullets kill people, and he's drafting a bill, putting severe restrictions on the manufacture, sale and distribution of bullets. He wants to make them in the first place, painfully expensive to buy. In the last place he'd like to see their manufacture and distribution restricted to the military and to very well-screened citizens who want them for, as the president said, hunting, which is the universal American word for shooting, a sport practised by all sorts and in the country, every class of American.

I pause here to mention again the fear that extreme legislation, a law of general prohibition, might invite the creation of a criminal underground industry, as the prohibition of the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol, did so distrustfully 74 years ago. Nobody seems to have gone into this, nobody I've heard about, who testified in the Brady hearings but I believe, since the passage of the bill, something of the sort is already happening. At least the first tremors of a movement that could turn into a landslide of bootlegging.

In the few days since the President signed the Bill, there's been a general swoop down on the gun stores across the nation and brief jaunts, wouldn't you guess, into the states that have no restrictive gun laws, but will of course, soon be restrained by the Brady Bill. What this means in the first place is everywhere an amended, as they say, an amended price list, a doubling in lots of places, right across the range of hand guns but especially of 15 types of assault weapons that are the favourites for people rushing the deadline. In some places the notices are up – buy now before they're outlawed – and one moron was shown fondling his new purchase in a store. It was of the type used on the luckless Long Island commuters and it cost, last week $400. After Brady, $585. It was worth it, the man said, because, after all, it's an investment. He clearly hopes to sell it, it and more, a year or whenever from now for twice the price.

This squalid and frightening development has moved President Clinton to hint at a ban on all assault weapons. Mr Bush, you may remember, proposed and got a ban on certain assault weapons, but only if they were manufactured abroad. A fairly limp concession to the gun control advocates, while bowing to the authority and the workforce of the national Rifle Association. Now Mr Clinton is under great pressure to convert this hint on banning all assault weapons into a policy. That would be a giant leap, after only two weeks of accustoming a divided Congress to the mild discipline of the Brady Bill.

The pressure comes from a great majority of the American people and how do we know how they think and feel? Well when the thinking and feeling is very strong about anything, we do know from the evidence of the polls. Mr Clinton listens to polls as much as any previous President and the polls show a massive turn in popular opinion about the need, more accurately the wish, the great wave of yearning, to get guns out of the hands of everybody but sportsmen and ordinary hunters. Really all the polls are saying, is help, won't somebody do something about guns.

The rampage of the man on the Long Island train is classified as a multiple murder, of which an expert reports the United States suffers about 30 a year. It's a question whether any of these horrors, done always by deranged men, have any useful moral to draw or control lesson to apply to the nationwide problem of crime on the streets, in the schools, certainly in the home. In most cities, most, literally well over 50% of all crimes committed with guns spring from family quarrels and happen in the home. About this national epidemic, the man on the Long Island train proves nothing. Born and raised on the island of Jamaica, in an affluent suburb, of devoted parents, described by an old friend as a fat, little, jovial kid, there's nothing of the usual threatening background – poverty, broken home, lack of love. Nothing, until, for no given reason, in college he suddenly developed an obsession with race, seeing in the smallest passing incident, an expression of hatred from everybody white or yellow. It's not much to go on for discovering a cure for the general malady.

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