These are My Times and I Must Know Them - 7 May 1999

The old Roman poet Martial, or 'Mar-tee-al' - he was a Spaniard who went to Rome in his 20s in about 64 AD, and spent the rest of his life in Rome - well, Martial was once chided by a friend for going to the Coliseum and watching lions fight and devour slaves.

Martial said he hated the scene as much as anyone could but he must go once. "These," he said, "are my times and I must know them."

I feel very much the same way about the atrocious shootings at the small town school in Colorado. I've not talked about them because I've always said I see no point in talking about great natural disasters - earthquakes, tornadoes, even assassinations - unless a commentary can help in some way. Nothing we say now can help those dead children and the well-liked teacher.

But these horrors keep happening far oftener in this country than anywhere and since the dread day in Littleton, everybody from the president and the Congress down - or up - to the psychiatrists, prison commissioners, clerics, parent-teachers' associations - everybody has had his or her say. And lots of good people have agonised over two words - why did it happen and how can it possibly be prevented?

Apart from one over-riding topic everything that you or I have thought and said has been thought and said. And mostly it amounts to laying down what ought to happen.

For instance parents ought to stay closer to their children and their pastimes at home. The two boys plotted for a year and spent months building a bomb in their garage. Surely somebody upstairs might have noticed.

But surely also there's no way of making parents pay attention by act of Congress. There is one state, the far western state of Oregon, has a law which punishes parents for any crime committed by a child of theirs. A fine going to a stiff prison sentence, according to the severity of the crime.

But apart from that every sort of idea has been offered as a preventative. Every school in the country ought to have metal detectors at every entrance, bullet proof vests, an ever-ready counselling group - trouble watchers who wonder if this boy might play with a gun at home, if that girl is likely to think of suicide - and so on and on.

Imaginative and well-meaning suggestions about what ought to happen, but not much consideration given to the how. Except on the main topic. The main, indeed the seething, argument all over the country swirls around gun control.

The pros and cons are about evenly split. The fight between gun controllers and the National Rifle Association - which maintains all Americans have a right to carry a gun - has been going on so long and so exhaustively that by now it has all the subtlety of two drunken sailors at the end of a saloon brawl.

I should tell you that every state has its own gun control laws - light or heavy, simple, complicated - and the nation has two, three laws. The first of which - the Brady Law - passed against Herculean resistance in the Congress after 12 years of lobbying by Sarah Brady - the wife of James Brady, who was President Reagan's press secretary and was with him and was shot and paralysed during the assassination attempt on the president.

The bill is called The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. It requires a five-day wait and a computer check on the background of anyone who wants to buy a handgun at retail. I stress retail because thousands of handguns are bought privately and from unlicensed dealers at gun shows. Well it's not much of a bill is it? Any intelligent crook of any age can easily fake his identity as a purchaser.

In the following year, 1994, President Clinton put up a new federal bill which made it a crime for any adult to sell or pass on a handgun to a juvenile. And then the possession of a concealed weapon became a federal crime.

Well now that's much better - or it would have been if the Justice Department had started catching and prosecuting and jailing offenders. However, of over 2,000 adults caught passing on guns, the Department of Justice prosecuted five one year, six last. Over 200,000 felons have tried to buy handguns - nine were prosecuted and convicted.

The solid core of the National Rifle Association's membership is the country people of America, especially in the south and west, who started as toddlers following their father at weekends on hunting expeditions.

Hunting in America means always and everywhere shooting and is not remotely a class - that's to say upper class - sport. On the contrary it has flourished since the earliest colonial days among poor people whose food was the animals that roamed the woods and the mountains and no president - no party - is ever going to prohibit the ownership of rifles.

You'd think once that was understood that the argument would end there but about once a year there's a murderous school shoot out and automatic weapons are used. How can anyone justify anyone's right to own an automatic assault weapon? If you have the luck - or the misfortunate, according to taste - to attend a meeting of the National Rifle Association you will hear a phrase constantly quoted, chanted as reverently as a prayer: "Our constitutional right to bear arms shall not be infringed."

What constitutional right?

On the façade of the National Rifle Association's headquarters building in Washington there is or was chiselled in the stone a phrase enclosed in quotation marks. It says: "..." - there are three dots which signify something missing, we're not bothering to print or find unnecessary - so: "... the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

That is the mantra, the watchword, the rationale for the NRA's conviction that the Constitution gives them a sacred right to keep guns. But it doesn't and the simple reason is in those three dots.

The first part of the sentence in the Constitution they didn't print and chisel. This is what the Second Amendment to the Constitution says in full:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of the free state, then the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The one condition of having that right was to be able to spring to attention and help to form a militia whenever it was called into being.

A militia? One prejudice the New England settlers brought to America was a fear of standing armies. Kings could seize control of an army overnight and enslave the people. So this nation, when it was created, absolutely rejected the idea of a standing army.

The militia was the alternative thought indispensable to a republic. And militiamen would form, be summoned by the president, in an emergency - an Indian uprising, a whisky rebellion (there was such a thing) - and then disbanded once the trouble was over.

So as Adam Smith wrote: "All men joined in some measure the trade of a soldier to whatever trade or profession they happened to carry on."

Of course the militia is long gone. We do have, you may have heard, a standing army, navy, air force, marine corps, and they take care of all the shooting that may be necessary for the security of the state.

So the only point in the Constitution that sanctions a citizen's right to own a gun is his willingness to join an institution that vanished a century and a half ago. There is no constitutional right to own a gun, to go out and shoot a rabbit - let alone to stick up a school or kill the president.

As for the root cause of the two boys' murderous spree - if there was a root cause - there are as many theories as there are religions, atheists, social scientists, and people who live by hunches. One of the most popular is the addiction of those two boys to video war games and especially the notorious Doom which can, by constant practice, teach kids to pick off single targets quickly and accurately.

This was a very persuasive line until some sociologist pointed out that no nation's children are more insensate in their addiction to war and murder games than the Japanese - who have 15 homicides a year against America's 10,000.

It all sends me back, I'm afraid, to an evening years - goodness, over 30 years - ago in Fort Worth, Texas, where in an hotel suite the President of the United States was having a late night chat with two or three of his closest pals. Not statesmen, not cabinet men - old school and college and early campaign pals who now constituted, we used to say, his Irish Mafia.

They were discussing ways - technologies, precautions - whereby the absolute personal safety of the president could be guaranteed. Pretty soon the president grew weary of what he took to be a pointless discussion. He got up. He said: "Look, if a man is determined to kill the President of the United States, he'll make it. Now I'm off to bed. Goodnight."

Early next afternoon, driving along a street in Dallas, he was shot and killed by a sniper in a sixth floor window overlooking the route.

On Kosovo this week there was a unique event - an interview with Mrs Milosevic - the most interesting part of which consisted of her single syllable responses to crucial questions. Was there not ethnic cleansing in Kosovo? Of course not. No thousands of people driven out from their homes by the Serbs? No. Why did they flee? From the Nato bombs.

There was no point in saying: 'But, of three quarters of a million refugees, thousands have testified they were forced out of their homes at gun point, very many killed, many raped, their homes trashed or burnt.' - Simply has not happened, sir.

Old Justice Holmes used to say: "History is written by the winners." From now on history is written by television and Mrs Milosevic says the camera can lie, and does.

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