362 - Getting Guns Off the Streets: Can Austria Show the Way?

If Austria can do it, why not these United States? The killings of a Minnesota legislator and her husband, the too-frequent shootings of American students in a dozen states, and setting fire to the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania elicit no more than worried shrugs among an American public buffeted by more and more random violence, some hate-filled, and all of it empowered by Trump's engendering of a pervasive atmosphere of disdain, retribution, and anomie.

Other countries are not constrained by spurious readings of the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court that enshrines the private ownership of lethal weapons -- almost without exception. The Court even seems ready to permit bump stocks by right, thus enabling the easy conversion of rifles into machine guns. It may also let convicted domestic abusers keep their weapons. Only a few states now bar dangerous rapid-firing assault weapons. The Supreme Court may soon further strengthen such permissiveness. The Second Amendment's innovative eighteenth-century acceptance of a mustered militia with their guns at home, but at the ready, could further override any restrictions now in place in reliably blue jurisdictions.

Austria, a small country of 9 million people nestled under Germany and Czechia and above Italy and Slovenia, reacted strongly to the killing last week of a school principal and twelve of his pupils. In Minnesota, long a state unsympathetic to white supremacy thinking, a lone gunman drew up a list of seventy targets and then raided private houses, shooting four, including two members of the lower house of the Minnesota legislature. In Graz, Austria, the deadly attack on schoolchildren led not to pious hand wringing but to a rapid refashioning of who can own guns. The Austrian government also wants to enhance the availability of psychological assessment and treatment opportunities.

The shooter, a 21-year old man who committed suicide after the attack on the school in Graz, failed a psychological test required for military service. His acquaintances described him as "conspicuously antisocial." Yet, as in many American states, the "loner" was nevertheless able freely and legally to buy guns, especially a lethal Glock pistol and a shotgun that he had modified to fire rapidly. He had been a student in the school that he shot up but had dropped out.

American state legislatures, and Congress, handcuffed by the Second Amendment as interpreted in several recent Supreme Court decisions, have never reacted effectively following their own too frequent and too repetitive school shootings.

But Austria's parliament this week enthusiastically seems ready to adopt measures intended to provide better psychological screenings and to raise ownership requirements. Austrians will have to be at least 25 years old, not 18 or 21, to own firearms. Previously, shotguns could purchased by anyone 18. The right-wing Freedom Party has endorsed the government's new proposals.

Prospective gun owners will soon have to pass a strengthened psychological test to own a gun. And parliament further will likely vote to make all applicants wait four weeks before being allowed legally to possess a gun of any kind.

Regarding the psychology of shooters, the right-leaning Austrian government wants to double the number of school psychologists and make it mandatory that all school dropouts are psychologically assessed. It is also seeking to restrict children’s access to social media, possibly by forbidding cellphone use in school buildings and during school hours.

Whether these new restrictions and the new and possibly enlightened emphasis on psychological screening will in fact remove the threat of outrage killings as in Graz remains to be seen. Will raising the age of possession by four years make a notable difference? But what is at least striking is the speed and the decisiveness with which the Austrian political universe decided to curtail gun ownership and to bar from ownership persons who have serious mental problems.

If the homicide rate in Austria begins to fall, that could be one sign that 25-year-olds are less angry and less suddenly retaliatory than their 21-year-old cousins. Or the authorities may become more vigilant and more cautious. Whatever, Austrians will now curb ownership in a manner that would be sensible in these United States but is currently barred by the contorted way the Supreme Court (only in this century) has read the Second Amendment's arming of an eighteenth-century militia's recruits. Massachusetts forbids assault rifles and has cracked down on previously wide-open gun sales and shops. But the courts have inhibited similar commonsense regulations in many other states, especially in the West.

Copying the Austrian initiatives is now an aspiration, not anything the politically beleaguered and Trump-oppressed public will soon achieve. But if Austria's gun violence recedes, perhaps it will show the way.