America’s Gun Madness, as Seen From Europe
MIRA KAMDAR, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/opinion/americas-gun-madness-as-seen-from-europe.html
accessed Oct. 12, 2015
l 今日美國持槍濫射幾乎每天都有一起。2012年被槍殺人數在法國是140,在美國是11,622。
林中斌 2015年10月12日
PANTIN, France — My mother lives near Roseburg, Ore. Her part of the world isn’t often in the news in France. But when I woke up last Friday morning, the mass shooting on the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg had made the French morning television news. There was video of a landscape I know well, of distressed local citizens, and of President Obama delivering his solemn remarks.
Viewed from France, everything about the United States looms large. Still, the numbers the newscasters ticked off — more than 300 million guns in circulation, mass shootings occurring at a rate of nearly one per day, thousands of victims of gun-related deaths — were shocking in their magnitude.
Guns are highly regulated in France. Hunting is a popular sport, but a hunting license is required before a rifle can be purchased. Guns can be bought for use at firing ranges, but only after an application has been filed and approved by the police. All gun buyers must provide a medical certificate of mental and physical fitness to own a weapon, and all guns must be registered. It is illegal to possess military-grade weapons. That the Oregon shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was equipped with five handguns, an assault rifle and several magazines of ammunition — all purchased legally — is unimaginable here.
Europe is not entirely immune from such horrific attacks. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo before making his way to an island summer camp and shooting 69 people, mostly young people, dead. In France, one of the worst mass shootings that was not terrorist-related happened in 1995, when Éric Borel, 16, shot and killed 12 people, including three members of his own family. And massacres by terrorists with political agendas have also shattered communities in France. In 2012, Mohammed Merah shot and killed three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse and killed four men. In January, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi murdered 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and Amedy Coulibaly, who coordinated his attacks with the Kouachi brothers, shot dead a police officer and then killed four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris.
Terrorists in Europe typically obtain their weapons illegally, and arms trafficking, a serious problem, is growing worse. In 2012, France increased fines and jail terms for possession and trafficking of illegal guns, but it’s unclear if that has had much effect. Recently, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve vowed that he would present a new “aggressive” plan to fight illegal arms possession and trafficking. He said the authorities had seized nearly 6,000 weapons from criminal groups every year since 2013, of which 1,200 were military-grade weapons, numbers that pale in comparison to the number of similar weapons in circulation in the United States.
Limits on gun possession in France mean that people can go about their daily lives without fear of dying at the hands of shooters at school, stores or movie theaters. Data for 2012 compiled by GunPolicy.org found 140 gun homicides in France compared with 11,622 in the United States.
A few weeks ago, my mother attended a seminar on aging in Snyder Hall, the building where Mr. Harper-Mercer opened fire at Umpqua Community College, killing nine people and wounding nine more. Like everyone else in Roseburg, she’s still in shock, but she also told me that the community’s grief was unlikely to change people’s strong views on gun ownership. In the aftermath of the killings, she said, “There is a lot of talk around here that Obama is going to use this to take away our guns.”
My mother is an Oregon farm girl. She learned to be a crack shot with a .22-caliber rifle she kept for protection when she worked as a forest-fire lookout as a college student. A few years ago she got a gun in case her horse broke its leg on a trail and she had to put it down. Owning a gun just seems like common sense to many people in the rural West.
But my mother also has enough common sense to favor reasonable gun control, and she’s sick of the violence. “I’m sure there’ll be another shooting soon,” she said, despairingly. And if the toll is big enough, I’m sure it will make the news in France.
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