Gun Violence, No Way to Prevent It ?
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
For a decade now, the satirical news site, the Onion, has run this same headline every time there is another large mass shooting. They change the article very little, placing the news story in a fictitious town but always including the quote
“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.”
Of course, maybe the Onion shouldn't make a joke about any mass shooting just as many right-wing politicians and gun fanatics insist, in the wake of a shooting, that “this is no time to talk about politics.” They will feign concern for grieving families, insisting that this is a time to mourn, not to debate gun legislation. It is, of course, a ruse. They know that the public’s attention span is very short.
It was almost 12 years ago when a lone gunman with an AR-15 went into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were six and seven year old children. President Obama thought, surely now the nation will get behind serious gun reform.
But even the bodies of 20 little children, torn apart by the battlefield force of the bullets from an AR-15, even though many parents have tried to keep their children’s memory alive, continually lobbying Congress for serious action... but nothing happened. People get distracted, they forget, and they move on.
The deadliest mass murder came less than five years later when a man with an AR-15 killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 others from his hotel window in Las Vegas, randomly shooting into the crowd at a country music concert. It was symbolic, really, but at least after that incident, the infamous “bump stock” was outlawed. A device that used the recoil of the rifle to turn a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle, a virtual machine gun. But this summer, in June, our out-of-control Supreme Court overturned the legislation that made bump stocks illegal.
Machine guns were outlawed in the United States almost a century ago, but this Supreme Court put them back on the streets.
Then, six years ago, when a former student from the Parkland High School in Florida went into his school and killed 16 people, that seemed to ignite an organized protest that featured several amazingly articulate students who went on a speaking tour of the country. I tried to get one of them booked to come speak at our church and couldn’t even get the booking agent to return phone calls because they were so in demand. But still, nothing changed.
Defenders of the gun industry have tried to tell us that we have these shooters because our young people play violent video games all of the time. But, folks, kids in Japan play video games more than American kids. Do you know how many school shootings there were in Japan? Zero. None. Nada.
Like it or not, the Onion is still right; we are the only country where this regularly happens. We know why it happens here. And we lack the political will to do anything about it.
Related: The Supreme Court Should Have Upheld The Bump Stock Ban
Of course, school shootings are just a small fraction of the gun murders in the United States every year, but they are among the most noticeable. Just over 300 students were killed in school last year, and 288 of those were in the USA. 8 in Mexico. 6 in South Africa. 5 in India. 4 in Pakistan and Nigeria. 3 in Afghanistan. 2 in Brazil, France, and Canada. Only one each in China, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Kenya, Greece, Azerbaijan, Hungary, and Estonia. None in most of the rest of the world. But we lost 288 students. Unimaginable. Indefensible. Isn’t it fair to say that it is insane?
Of course, the death toll is the worst, but beyond the dead and wounded, there is to be considered how every schoolchild in the country is traumatized by these constant “active shooter” exercises. Bulletproof backpacks for your kids is now a thing. Schools, which are always strapped for resources, are now having to spend precious dollars on security guards, metal detectors, hardened doors, and additional staff.
And what’s more, schools and police departments are now always on edge, and our schools are awash in cell phones, so anyone who wants to create some excitement or get their school closed down for the day just has to make a call. Late last month, April Ruben reported in Axios that:
In a single afternoon last week, schools in Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Texas, Michigan, and Maryland all received threats.
In Volusia County, Fla., the sheriff's office received 54 tips about potential threats in a single night this month. All the threats turned out to be false.
In Springfield, Ohio, schools closed over hoax bomb threats following the GOP presidential ticket's amplification of a debunked conspiracy theory that immigrants in the city were eating pets.
The threat of gun violence is real. We have nearly 300 dead students every year to prove that, but then schools across the country are regularly disrupted by fake reports that, regardless of the fact that they are fake, have to be taken seriously and investigated. Is it any wonder then that so many of our schools have become so ineffective in performing their primary mission, which is to educate?
Related: How to Talk (and Not to Talk) About School Shootings
Law enforcement officials across Florida have started to arrest students who call in threats, and they perp-walk the student and the student’s parents, hoping that public humiliation will help to curb this dangerous trend. School has just started, and they have already arrested dozens of kids between the ages of 11 and 15. One 11 year-old turned out to have a small arsenal of guns and swords in his room, stockpiled for when he actually would attack his school.
Nothing can be done, says the only nation where this regularly happens.
We used to hear the NRA claiming that gun laws don’t work, except for the fact that they do work in every other nation of the world. They point at murder rates in Chicago and New York, where there are strict gun laws, as proof that they don’t work, when, obviously, a city law doesn’t keep someone from just outside the city from bringing a gun in.
I have pointed out before that Mexico only has one legal gun store in the whole country, and they only serve members of police forces, but there are more than 6,000 gun shops in the United States, just across the border from Mexico, so our gun shops are literally arming the drug cartels in their civil war in Mexico. You know, a lot of the undocumented immigrants to the USA are coming here because it is so dangerous in Mexico, but, come on, why are there so many guns in Mexico? Where there are a lot of guns, there are a lot of shootings. This is how it works.
The NRA has said for years that guns don’t kill people; people kill people, but the truth of it is that people with guns kill people, particularly people with assault rifles and handguns, both of which are made solely for the purpose of shooting people. You don’t deer hunt with a pistol. You don’t shoot pheasant with an AR-15. If you need to defend your home, get a shotgun. If you need to shoot a duck, get a single-shot rifle. If you need to shoot a duck four or five times, that bird is probably too tough to eat anyway.
I have no idea how many credible assassination threats are made against presidents, candidates, politicians, and celebrities. The secret service doesn’t give out that information. We only hear about it when shots are fired or a gunman is apprehended.
Naturally, when Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt, Trump allies tried to blame Kamala Harris and those of us who have been warning for years that Trump is a danger to democracy. But the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans, who have made it absolutely certain that almost anyone with enough money can buy a battlefield-style assault rifle.
I don’t think that the USA has a much larger population of crazy people compared to other countries. Probably, we have an average number of crazy people, it is just that this nation is so awash in guns that crazy people, kids, angry people, or just lonely teenagers who want attention can get their hands on lethal weapons and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition, and in that context, it is a wonder that we don’t have more people killed than we do.
Look, people, the Second Amendment was written when the arms they referenced were highly inaccurate, single-shot muskets. There is no rational argument that the authors of the Constitution could have imagined assault rifles with a 100-round capacity. It should also be noted that the Second Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights as a concession to enslavers who were frequently dramatically outnumbered by the people that they enslaved and in constant fear of a very reasonable revolt. This was a very real fear of George Washington’s.
Related: The Latest Massacre Shows the Second Amendment Model of ‘Slave Patrols’ Is Still in Effect
I know it will get some people all twisted up like pretzels to hear me say it, but the Second Amendment is in sore need of amendment. Jesus didn’t write the Second Amendment. Justifiably terrified enslavers did.
Our children and grandchildren should not be traumatized every school year with active shooter drills and seeing armed police officers storming the building because someone called in a fake threat. Every other developed nation in the world has found a way for people to own the arms they actually need and to store their hobby guns at shooting ranges so that our kids can feel safe when they go to school without having to wear a bulletproof vest on the school bus.
The NRA, thankfully, does not have the political clout they once had, and they no longer have the financial resources to buy politicians that they once had. But still, we have a shortage of courage among our legislators, but here is the good news:
The majority of Americans favor sensible gun laws, and so if we just stop voting for the politicians who refuse to give us sensible gun laws, we will have sensible gun laws, much like the rest of the world, in a single election cycle. It is just that easy if only people would begin to vote in favor of their children living long enough to graduate.
The only reason that the most common cause of death among children in our country is being shot is because of the indifference of voters who will not vote for change.