'Easy Guns'
Comments from around the world:
Australia
"Eleven years ago we took action to limit the availability of guns, and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country."
—Australian Prime Minister John Howard, expressing sympathy for the victims' families and referring to the 1996 shooting spree by a man with a semi-automatic rifle who killed 35 people in Port Arthur, on the island of Tasmania. Australia banned most types of semi-automatic weapons after the incident.
Asia
"We cannot but worry that [Cho's] shocking atrocity would implant a dark image [of] Koreans in to the brains of Americans and world citizens."
—Editorial in Manhwa Ilbo, Seoul, South Korea
Europe
"Why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?"
—The Times of London, in an editorial delving into the American psyche and the gun laws across the nation
"It is a delusion … to imagine that controls on their own will stop the rise of gun crime, and the killing that results … what is needed is a wholesale shift in the national culture—and that will take rather longer than an arms ban."
— Mangus Linklater, The Times of London columnist
"There's only one real ‘freedom' in America—the freedom to kill one anotherr… if guns weren't so readily available in the ‘land of the free,' this tragedy might never have happened."
— London's Daily Mail columnist Russell Miller
"There is such a high murder rate in the United States that even if you excluded the deaths caused there by the use of guns, their homicide rate would still be higher than ours. In other words, even if there were not a single gun in America, there would still be more murders and manslaughters than in Britain. Bringing gun control to America would not stop it being a country where a lot of people get killed."
— James Bartholomew, political commentator at the Daily Express in London
"[T]he response of many who wish America ill will have been gratuitous schadenfreude. They see a people who live by the gun also dying by it, be they Marines in Anbar province or students in Virginia…. How can American soldiers disarm Iraqi families of their weapons in Baghdad yet claim the right to arm themselves to the teeth back home?"
— The Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins
"In a country where ‘the right to bear arms' is written into the Constitution and where there are an estimated 192 million firearms, the problem isn't simply one of a particular interest group. After the tragedy, voices rose up to deplore the fact that professors and students are not authorized to arm themselves, since one of them could have neutralized the killer. With that kind of reasoning, America is not close to overcoming its violence."
— Excerpts from an editorial headlined "Tragédie Américaine," in France's Le Monde newspaper
In Virginia at the age of 13, you can buy a revolver at a supermarket."
—From the Italian newspaper il Messaggero, in an article headlined Pistole Facili (Easy Guns). Italian newspapers carried extensive comments from Marina Cogo and Giancarlo Bordonaro, two 23-year-old Virginia Tech students from Milan. Cogo is returning home, vowing not to return.
Middle East
I feel sorry that there are innocent civilians getting killed for no reason. We in Iraq have tasted this curse and we know how difficult it is to lose a loved one. [But] at other times, especially when I'm emotional, I think, 'Let the American people get a taste of what they brought us, death and tragedies and blood everywhere.'
—Khalid Mohammed, a 33-year-old civil engineer in Baghdad
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