Many Americans' love of guns, enshrined in their constitution, is so strong that they resist attempts to tighten firearms laws and see no link between Cho Seung-Hui's legal purchase of two guns and his killing spree, writes Denis Stauntonin Blacksburg, Virginia
Outside the shabby, cream-coloured building he shares with a pawn shop about an hour away from Blacksburg, Virginia, Roanoke Firearms owner John Markell is explaining why his shop's website has been suspended.
"We shut that down after the 200th threat. Everything from death threats, bodily harm, you name it. I got a phone call at midnight at my house last night," he said, as he opened his coat to reveal a revolver strapped to his belt.
Inside, it was business as usual as customers surveyed the dozens of shotguns, rifles and assault weapons arrayed against the walls and studied the handguns displayed in glass cases on the counter that sell for as little as $150 (€110) or as much as $3,000 (€2,200).
A short, paunchy man with wispy hair and a grey, drooping moustache, Markell has become a hate figure for many in the US since it emerged that, on March 16th, Cho Seung-Hui walked into Roanoke Firearms and bought a 9mm semi-automatic Glock pistol, one of two guns he used at Virginia Tech last Monday to kill 32 people before shooting himself.
Monday's massacre has transfixed the US, not only on account of its scale but because of the mystery surrounding Cho himself, a troubled-23 year-old who seldom spoke to others but left behind an angry, multimedia testament portraying himself as an avenging martyr on behalf of the scorned and marginalised.
AS DETAILS EMERGED about Cho's history of stalking women students and his involuntary admission into a psychiatric hospital 18 months ago, friends and relatives of his victims wanted to know why he was allowed to buy a gun at all.
"He showed me a driver's licence that established Virginia residency, because I can't sell a handgun to anyone who's not from Virginia," Markell told me.
"I have to verify that address, so we used his chequebook to match the address. He had his INS card, you know, the Green Card. It was current. He filled out the federal and the state paperwork and they ask questions about your status in this country. Then it's sent to the state police. They run the FBI computer check and they'll either tell me to proceed or they'll tell me it's delayed while they do a further background check, or to deny it." The FBI check gave Cho the all-clear and within minutes of walking into Roanoke Firearms, he walked out with a weapon that would enable him to turn his revenge fantasy into a bloody, horrifying reality.
"Well, I don't know how the system is supposed to work but apparently it's broken. There doesn't seem to be any communication between the [ Virginia] Tech medical community and the FBI database. If there had, it would have shown up and he would have been denied," Markell said. "The only thing I'm responsible for is selling a gun legally. I'm certainly not responsible for the deaths of anyone." Until this week, Markell protested, guns he had sold had killed only six people - in four murders and two suicides.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an umbrella group that includes religious organisations, child welfare advocates, doctors and social justice groups, led calls this week for politicians to respond to the Virginia Tech killings by tightening gun laws. The coalition's spokesman, Ladd Everett, claims that Monday's massacre was entirely preventable by moderate gun control legislation.
"There's no reason that anyone can see why this kid should have been sold a handgun. Whatever the explanation is, I haven't spoken to a single individual who thought that this young man should have been sold two handguns on two separate occasions," he said.
Fewer than one in three Americans owns a gun - although there are 200 million in circulation in the US - and polls have shown a consistent 60 per cent in favour of tighter gun control. Yet the past decade has seen a steady liberalisation of gun laws, both at federal and state level, and an erosion of many of the restrictions that had been in place since the 1960s.
The second amendment to the US constitution states that "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" and gun ownership was almost unrestricted until 1968.
Rising organised crime and urban violence, coupled with the assassinations of the Rev Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy led to a statute that banned mail-order sales of firearms or ammunition, handgun sales to minors, firearm sales to convicted felons, and the importation of some semi-automatic assault weapons and cheap handguns known as "Saturday night specials". After some liberalisation under Ronald Reagan, new restrictions were introduced during the 1990s, including a 10-year ban on some semi-automatic weapons and ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
The Republican-controlled Congress allowed that ban to lapse in 2004 and gun rights organisations such as the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America have won one legislative battle after another in recent years.
Last month, a federal court ruled that a 29-year-old ban on handguns in the District of Columbia is unconstitutional, a decision the Supreme Court is expected to uphold.
MICHAEL HAMMOND, A consultant with Gun Owners of America, told me he was heartened by the muted response of leading Democrats to this week's shootings as they shied away from calling for gun control as many had after the Columbine High School shootings eight years ago.
"When the Columbine episode happened, the Democrats in this country concluded that it had changed the national mood and that they could ride the tragedy to legislative and also political victory," he said.
Republicans blocked gun control bills after Columbine, however, and in the 2004 presidential election, the gun rights issue may have tipped up to four states towards George Bush.
"I think after that, the Democrats looked at it and said, if Columbine can't change the national mood in favour of gun control, what can?" Hammond said.
Both of the main gun lobbies reacted to this week's shootings by arguing that Cho would have been stopped if the other students at Virginia Tech were armed and called for the gun ban at public universities to be lifted.
"It appears to us that our country was safe before our first gun control law was enacted and as a result, increasingly, of people like Cho being able to go from classroom to classroom without the fear that anyone else would have a gun and shoot back, it appears to us that that, in and of itself, has made our country dramatically more dangerous," Hammond said.
In fact, guns are seldom used by civilians in the US to shoot criminals and the FBI reported that there were only 143 incidents during 2005 in which a civilian used a firearm in justifiable homicide, compared to more than 10,000 non-justified homicides.
For Hammond, the right to own a gun is above all about "individual liberty, freedom from government and self-reliance" but he acknowledges that, especially in the South, it is also linked to an idea of masculinity.
"Definitely the notion of maleness in some parts of the country is connected with going hunting with Dad, going fishing with Dad. It starts in some parts of the country from the point at which you're a little boy and are sort of taught that that's what men do," he said.
When Laura Browder moved from Boston more than a decade ago to teach English at Virginia Commonwealth University, she was astonished to discover how much guns were part of daily life in the South. On her first New Year's Eve in Richmond, Virginia's capital, Browder was expecting a quiet night as she watched her neighbours sitting placidly on their porches all evening.
"Suddenly at midnight, world war three breaks out. The old people in the old folks home across the street start shooting their shotguns and rifles into the air, the teenagers have their AK-47s, the middle-aged people have their .45s," she said.
"It's very easy when you grow up in New England to think that everyone is an atheist, everyone believes in gun control, everyone is a fervent environmentalist, or what have you. I moved here and discovered that none of those things was true and in fact, for many people, gun ownership or the possibility of gun ownership was very much tied up with their identity." As she settled into her new job, Browder learnt that many of her women friends who were politically left-wing and who seemed to share her outlook on most issues, lived in houses that were full of guns, some of which they had received as wedding presents. She became so intrigued by the pervasiveness of the gun culture that she wrote a book, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, in which she analyses, among other things, the way gun manufacturers market their products to women.
'MANY OF THE ads say that to be a good mother, you need to be an armed mother, in effect. They approach women on the basis of motherhood - you need to be able to protect your children. And the implication is often that there are no men in the house so it's up to you. Of course, the other thing they use is women's fear that they'll be raped or otherwise attacked either in their homes or walking home through a dark parking lot, coming home from work, that kind of thing," she said.
For gun manufacturers, women represent a promising, untapped market that has become more important as hunting has declined in popularity since the 1980s. Smith & Wesson launched its LadySmith handgun in 1989 and other firms quickly followed suit, producing guns designed for women's smaller hands, and handbags made to hold a gun.
The NRA says the numbers enrolling in its Women on Target firearms training course have soared from 500 in 2000 to almost 6,000 last year, and Women and Guns magazine estimates between 11 and 17 million American women own a gun.
Browder believes, however, that the gun industry's decision to woo women is based on more than just the obvious commercial advantage of expanding its market beyond a core group of white males.
"Part of the gun lobby's interest in marketing to women is that it softens the image of the gun. So that instead of thinking about someone like Cho, the crazed loner out shooting his fellow students, we think of a nice, blond, suburban mother tucking her children into bed with a .38 on the nightstand. It's a much softer image," she said.
Gun companies have certainly made a killing with their new branding strategies and Smith & Wesson executives were giddy with delight at a conference call with investors last year as they reported a 27.4 per cent increase in sales over the previous year. The company is sponsoring Nascar races, producing a cable- television show and promoting a pistol match to raise money for children with cancer. It is also licensing its name to footwear, flashlights, baseball caps and barbecue grills and negotiating product placement deals with Hollywood.
Much of its success last year was due to a 69 per cent rise in handgun sales, partly driven by the introduction of the 460XVR, the highest-velocity revolver in the world, which can shoot a bullet at 2,300 feet per second.
If the gun industry is worth $2 billion (€1.47 billion) a year, the gun lobby is about much more than money and Everett maintains that there is something quite sinister at the heart of it.
"If you really drive down into the gun rights ideology in this country, it's seeded in a very anti-government ideology. And there is a belief among the extreme gun rights community - the gun lobby - that private citizens in this country, they feel, have a right to overthrow our government with their own private firearms should they deem it has become tyrannical," he said. "The natural question there becomes: when would such action become justified? And what right do the rest of us have to have a say?" Everett believes that this anti-government ideology explains why gun rights campaigners refuse to countenance even the mildest controls that are clearly targeted at criminals.
"If you hold the belief that you need to stockpile arms against your own government, then even the most moderate gun control proposal would seem suspect. Even the most moderate proposal could seem like government encroachment," he said.
Hammond appeared to confirm that analysis when he told me that, despite Cho's mental problems and the fact that a court determined that he was a danger to himself and others, he should not have been prevented from buying a gun.
"The determination as to whether he was walking loose on the streets or not was not ours but given that he was on the streets, given that he was never committed, I mean, what law do you construct to prohibit him from purchasing a gun that doesn't also prohibit everyone in the country from purchasing a gun?" he asked.