The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is a tragedy that obliges us to question the relationship between freedom and security, between democracy and violence. Political theorist Benjamin Barber and Jim Sleeper from Yale explain why, at last, the American establishment should find the courage to defy society’s steadily advancing culture of death and to confront the powerful gun lobby that fuels and exploits it. For Giancarlo Bosetti, the discussion on the relationship between the use of freedom and responsibility aroused by this terrible event can also help us better understand the challenges newborn Arab democracies will soon have to face.