No more guns for loners?

Published on : 11 April 2011 - 10:59am | By John Tyler

The Netherlands is struggling to deal with the consequences of Saturday’s shooting in Alphen aan den Rijn, where a lone gunman shot and killed 6 people before killing himself. The news that the 24-year old killer had a history of psychiatric problems - which the police were reportedly aware of - has led to questions about how he was able to obtain and keep a gun ownership permit.

The Netherlands boasts some of the strictest gun laws in the world, but the gunman in Alphen aan den Rijn, Tristan van der Vlis, was a member of a shooting club and had a permit to own five guns. It is not yet clear if all the weapons he used on Saturday were in his possession legally, but just the fact that some of them may have been has given many pause.

Gun owners in the Netherlands need to meet strict conditions – but these do not include psychological testing. The revelation that van der Vlis had a history of depression and suicidal impulses and spent 10 days in a secure psychiatric unit in 2006 has led to calls for such testing before permits are issued or renewed.

Social control

But Henk Vogelzang disagrees. He is director of local shooting club K.G.O. in Bussum, a town to the east of Amsterdam. Mr Vogelzang says that over the years, his club has alerted the authorities on a number of occasions about members with legal gun permits who were behaving in an inappropriate manner. In some cases, this involved hanging around with suspicious people and in other cases a certain manner of talking about using guns.

"You also often can see it in the way some people deal with the sport of target shooting. Some people seem more concerned with the gun itself than with the shooting."

Mr Vogelzang says that in every case where the club was concerned and alerted the authorities, they ended up withdrawing the gun permit. He feels this kind of social control should be sufficient to prevent legally owned guns being used to murder innocent people.

Connecting the dots
Dutch security expert Glenn Schoen says this is precisely the type of information sharing necessary to prevent shooting incidents. One of the lessons learned from other countries where these sorts of killing sprees have taken place is that the perpetrators often provide clues as to what they are planning to do.

The problem is that information does not always make its way to the right people.
The Netherlands, however, has lagged behind with this sport of preventive approach and was largely taken by surprise by Saturday’s shooting. According to Schoen, the Dutch are used to thinking that such incidents happen in other countries, but not here.

"There’s always that feeling of that won’t happen to us, we need not fear that. And of course you don’t control all the factors it’s not yours to prevent in all cases and sadly enough, time has caught up with The Netherlands, and the naiveté is over."

While efforts to prevent such shootings will never be 100 percent successful, the Netherlands has the knowledge-base, and experts in the field of psychology needed to take action, says Schoen. What’s been missing up till now is the belief that such action is needed.

"However it has not yet been a primary focus because this kind of incident has not yet happened here for people to know what are the signals we need to look for and who do we have to report them to."

After the tragic incident in Alphen aan den Rijn on Saturday, that is likely to change.
(gsh)
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/no-more-guns-loners