ON NOVEMBER 30 last year, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner walked into a Sportsman's Warehouse store in Tucson, Arizona, and bought a Glock 19 semi-automatic handgun, serial number PWL699. He passed the instant background check required by US federal law. Under the lax state gun laws, he was then allowed to conceal and carry his pistol without a permit. On Sunday, Loughner was charged with using the gun in a rampage in a parking lot outside a Tucson supermarket that left 20 people shot, six of them fatally. Among the dead, a federal judge, John Roll; among the wounded, a Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at point-blank range while addressing a public meeting.
It is easy to view this terrible crime as the work of a single, apparently deluded person rather than as the embodiment of a culture of violence in a nation whose powerful gun lobby prides itself in the constitutional right to bear arms. As a Republican senator said of Saturday's shooting spree, "But the weapons don't kill people. It's the individual that killed these people." Yes, but if it's easier for the individual to acquire a weapon, it's easier for that person to kill, whatever his state of mind.
In Arizona, as of last year, when the gun laws were further relaxed, it is ridiculously easy to obtain weapons of deadly power: any law-abiding resident aged over 18 can buy or possess a firearm, although one has to be at least 21 to buy a handgun; guns are permitted almost everywhere - including in the state Capitol and public buildings - except a business or doctor's office; and concealed weapons are allowed in places that serve alcohol, as long as the owner isn't imbibing.
Although the shootings are the latest in an appallingly regular series of rampages in various parts of the US, there is still remarkable reticence in tackling the country's diverse and confusing gun laws. Political timidity is part of it - the National Rifle Association and its ilk have demonstrated their considerable persuasive force at the polls - but so too is a national mindset that confuses the right of protection with the right to kill. But laws and attitudes can change: witness, in Australia, the Howard government's gun amnesty after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Maybe the attempted assassination of a member of the US Congress and the attempted killing of other officials, not to mention those who died or were wounded in this senseless spree, might at last bring about commonsense reform of gun laws.