NEWTOWN, Connecticut: The mayor of Connecticut's capital city, whose own father was killed with a gun, urged Washington on Sunday to take the lead in curbing "an incredible appetite" among Americans for guns.
Speaking two days after the massacre of 20 first-grade pupils and six adults in Newtown, Pedro Segarra said Connecticut citizens are "very supportive of demilitarizing our community and getting these weapons off the streets."
But the mayor added: "A lot of this really requires action by our central government in Washington."
"And as long as we don't have those efforts, some degree of decisive intervention, it's very difficult for states to do it on their own."
Segarra recalled a successful pre-Christmas firearms amnesty scheme that his city ran for a few hours on a single day three weeks ago.
"We were buying back, or having people turn in, about one weapon per minute," he told reporters during an impromptu interview on a downtown street in Newtown, where had come to pay his respects to families of the dead.
"In a city of 125,000, to pick up one weapon per minute? When you're merely offering a gift card of $75? A lot of people were just turning them in because they wanted to just get rid of them."
Nevertheless, he added, there remains among Americans "an incredible appetite" for guns, with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms processing two million gun permit applications in November alone.
"What are we doing to feed that appetite?" It's not just any one thing," he asked.
"We really need to have a more global strategy. The commercialization of violence through... the arts, music, video games and all that -- we really need to take a close look at the impact that is having on our society."
Segarra, 53, a Democrat born in Puerto Rico who grew up in inner-city New York, said he has never personally owned a gun -- for a reason.
He said he was only a year old when his father was shot and killed. "I never got to have a father," he said. He also recalled the gun deaths of two close friends while growing up in the South Bronx -- they were aged 14 and 13.
"I have no desire to own a gun. They've only meant not-so-great things."
Connecticut, which includes many New York commuter suburbs, has some of the toughest gun laws in the United States, where the right "to keep and bear arms" is entrenched in the Constitution and stridently upheld by a powerful gun lobby.
- AFP/fa
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