 <ICLE-IT-TOR-0024.2> 
Possession of guns should be reduced by law. This act can represent one of the most important steps in order to decrease the number of violent crimes in Western societies. In fact, the free market of firearms stand as a continuous and enormous danger for everybody's daily life .
First of all, we have to consider how the problem of gun ownership goes beyond the phenomenon of organized crime. Modern urban population, in almost all the world, sometimes resents the difficult efforts for a civil cohabitation. Intolerance, unconscious racism, and even the common but annoying incidents of daily life may often drive the common man on the edge of violence. Newspapers often report cases of men - a driver being bumped with his car, for example - who, if provoked, give place to irrational hunger by shooting another person. In such circumstance, it is not possible to control one's own action, and it is too late to overcome a man with a gun .
Danger proves to be even more evident if we look at the rising number of murders made by psychopatic and serial killers. The slaughter of Dunblane, a little Scottish village, may be seen as significant. The murderer had always been known as an unbalanced character; nevertheless, he was permitted to own a gun, finally killing several children. Someone claims that excessive violence in today's action movie is pernicious. Weak minds can be tempted to act as Doctor Hannibal does in * The Silence of the lambs *. But, what does makes fantasy come real is the possibility, for a disturbed person, to have a real gun in his hands .
A real proof against gun ownership can be traced in statistics. Where firearms are more available, we can observe the existence of a very high rate of criminality, from shop-lifting to murder. In United States, President Bill Clinton was able only to reduce partially the possession of guns. Probably Clinton's electorate would not have accepted a larger reform. This can be ascribed to the cultural gap dividing Europe and America. The myth of the American Dream find its original shape in the figure of the lonely pioneer, fighting against the wilderness with a rifle as his only companion. But while the west frontier does not exist anymore, still it comes easy for many politicians to assume populist assertions builded on fear and ignorance. People are asked to defend themselves from the increasing violence in the streets by acquiring guns. this reasoning resembles a vicious circle. What is more, american debate is often poisoned by powerful lobbies, as the National Rifle Association. This group can spend a lot of money in advertising its own interested opinions. But the power of such lobby can go farther, and probably many members of American Parliament are not stronger to bribery .
People should rather trust the police as the guardian of everyone's security. But in every person there is a trend towards a kind of sterile self-protection. As for capital punishment, the free possession of firearms comes and revives insecurity, while pretending to stop it. Drastic measures, based on the supposed necessity of killing, seem to comfort a great part of the public opinion. But we can affirm with William Butler Yeats that * the best all lack convinctions, while the worst are all full of passionate intensity *. What is more, modern democracies are not so developed in terms of complexity of the political debate. Television, the modern media which substitutes the ancient arena of classical era, is superficial by its nature. As we know from Mc Luhan * Medium is the message *. Television does not seem to report the real cause underlying the problem of violent crimes and gun ownership. As a result, the prohibition of buying firearms would probably be perceived as an unbearable restraint of one's freedom .
