was as great as it was because a mentally disturbed individual could purchase a Glock machine pistol with a 30-plus-bullet clip, no questions asked. This is not a weapon for home self-defence, and I don't think you use it for hunting moose or pheasants either (although I'll try to check with Ms. Palin and Dick Cheney to make sure). It's hard to see what the most avid gun owner would do with it other than
The second point is that because we have no national health insurance in America, and because state and local mental health services are being sacrificed on the altar of budget-slashing, there are now probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of untreated mental patients on the streets. Most of them are dangerous only to themselves (they comprise a sizable part of the homeless population), some are a serious risk to their own families, and a small number are potential Jared Loughners - not all that many, but enough to generate irreparable harm and
It's a truism for those of us on the left that mental illness itself is socially conditioned, and that a sicker society will produce a greater number of sick individuals. And tragedies don't happen only in America. In China, there have been a rash of fatal knife-wielding attacks on nurseries. In Germany years ago, a sick fan obsessed with tennis star Steffi Graff stabbed Monica Seles during a match, almost killing her. But almost only in America do the perpetrators have easy access to virtually unregulated automatic assault
This, we can be sure, won't change anytime soon. And while politicians will spend all kinds of time using this case to make arguments for the death penalty, and whether Congressional representatives should have 24/7 Secret Service protection, or whether political speech needs to be censored to "protect society," this mass murder will hardly even enter the debate over repealing or defunding health care reform. More mental as well as physical illness will go undiagnosed or untreated, and more death and social destruction will ensue - mostly quietly while no one notices, but once in a while in the public square, where everyone can see but no one is allowed to understand why it happened. • David Finkel is a member of the US socialist organisation Solidarity http://www.solidarity-us.org/
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22 Tunisia: Western media outlets have tried to portray recent events in Tunisia as a mass struggle for democratic rights against the highly corrupt and authoritarian regime of Ben Ali, the country's President since 1987. What they usually fail to mention is that Ben Ali had implemented neoliberal economic policies with the full backing of the imperialist powers. Policies that enriched foreign capitalist investors alongside Ben Ali and his cronies whilst impoverishing the Tunisian masses. What imperialism as well as the ruling classes elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East fear is the 'domino effect'. They fear that Tunisia may be the first of many despotic regimes in the region to fall. When western commentators look at Tunisia and say 'This is a democratic struggle' what they are really saying is what 'We want this to remain to a democratic struggle'. In other words representative democracy may be conceded under mass pressure (though that existed formally under Ben Ali) as long as capitalist control of the economy remains. What they will oppose at all costs though is the Tunisian masses taking power into the own hands, that is expropriating the bourgeoisie and taking political power based on institutions of direct proletarian democracy. This though is precisely the only way that the Tunisian masses can take their revolution forward. The article by Basel Saleh and the statement from the Al Mounadil-a (website of the Fourth International's Moroccan section) provide the reader with the social and political background to the revolt of the Tunisian masses.