It was, in President Clinton's words, "a moment of savagery at the front door of American civilisation". The murder of two security guards is, unfortunately, a common enough occurrence in the United States and throughout the world. What made Friday's deadly events different from others was the place in which they occurred. The United States Capitol is the centre of that country's democracy. That is the very reason why it is open to the public and why no act of violence is ever likely to cause it to be put off-limits to citizens and visitors from abroad. The tourists are back inside the Capitol today and not a single voice in America or abroad has suggested that they should not be.
Questions have been asked about the quality and quantity of security at the Capitol and the possible need for greater vigilance. In fact two bombings, in 1971 by a radical organisation called the Weather Underground and in 1983 by self-styled communists, caused security to be intensified. As a result the Capitol has been relatively free from dangerous incidents compared to the White House at which pot shots have been taken on numerous occasions.
The case of Russell Eugene Weston Jnr, the man suspected of Friday's murders, raises wider questions. He had come to the attention of the Secret Service for threatening behaviour in the past. Diagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic and described by neighbours as being reasonable when on medication but aggressive when not, Weston displayed many of the characteristics of a tiny but menacing section of the American community. He believed, for example, that a neighbour's satellite TV dish was being used to spy upon him. He brought himself off to the wilds of Montana to live in a cabin, incidentally quite close to that in which the convicted Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, had hidden himself from the outside world.
Weston also spoke frequently of his view of the danger posed to citizens by the government and in particular by President Clinton. In many of his actions and opinions his behaviour resembled that of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma killing 168 people. McVeigh held virulently anti-government views and suffered from the delusion that the United States Army had inserted a computer chip in his buttocks in order to spy on him at all times.
Although there is evidence that such politically-centred paranoia exists in far greater numbers in the United States than had previously been believed, there is nothing to suggest that on a per-capita basis Americans are more prone to such dangerous delusions than any other nationality. What does cause anxiety, however, is that the Secret Service decided that Weston should not be regarded as a danger. What gives even greater concern is that a man with such a disturbed background found it possible, perhaps even easy, to possess a six-shot .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver. Once again the "right", based on pseudo-democratic argument, of all citizens to bear arms has played a part in sending shock waves through the halls of true democracy. Attempts, through the law, to make it more difficult for dangerous people to get their hands on dangerous weapons have been shown once more to have failed.