The US has always put gun ownership before lives – under Donald Trump this is less likely to change than ever
It is difficult to envisage a death toll large enough to force a change of mind. Indeed some, including President Trump, take the view that the lessons of these shootings is that there are not enough guns available to Americans rather than too many
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Your support makes all the difference.The Independent, as with the rest of the world’s media, has had to report on the aftermath of American school shooting attacks with a depressing frequency over the past few decades. The latest, which happens to be in Florida, has thus far claimed the lives of 17 people. Such has been the number of these murderous episodes that only the most serious have made the front pages. Indeed, this is the 18th reported school shooting this year alone.
The only crime of the mostly young victims killed and injured was to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, there to become the latest victims of some disaffected – or worse – youth with a thirst for blood and vengeance. More than that, though, a youth with far too easy access to weapons of murder.
The proximate cause for the fatalities seems clear. The man arrested, Nikolas Cruz, had previously been expelled from the school, and had perhaps had a disturbed family life and upbringing. These are hardly justifications for his actions, and we will learn more as the accused goes through the justice system, but they are parts of the backdrop and context. President Donald Trump, acting with all the sensitivity he has become famed for, dismissed the assailant as “mentally disturbed”, implying that this was some sort of extraordinary, unprecedented action – almost an alibi. There are legitimate questions to be answered about why the authorities failed to act on warnings about Mr Cruz’s online activities, such as a flagged YouTube video from last year that was reported to the FBI.
However the point is that there are many volatile, resentful adolescents with plenty of grudges expelled from schools every day all over the world. Yet only in the United States do some such individuals inflict mass slaughter with automatic weapons in a near random series of homicides. In Congress, Senator Chris Murphy, who represents the area containing the Sandy Hook school, where 20 lost their lives in 2012, put it well: “This happens nowhere else other than the United States.”
The US has always put gun ownership before people's lives – under Donald Trump this is less likely to change than ever
“It only happens here not because of coincidence or bad luck but as a consequence of our own inaction,” Sen Murphy continued. That inaction, of course, being to do little to tighten gun control or move to alter the constitutional “right to bear arms”, without which these attacks would not be perpetrated on the epidemic scale that America is experiencing. There have been more than 200 school shooting attacks since Sandy Hook.
The truth, though, is that Americans are not yet persuaded that these constant atrocities are sufficient justification to lose that cherished constitutional right. It is difficult to envisage a death toll large enough to force a change of mind. Indeed some, including President Trump, take the view that the lessons of these shootings is that there are not enough guns available to Americans rather than too many. The logic runs that if, say, teachers of caretakers were armed, they could immediately shoot dead an assailant before they do any more damage.
As Mr Trump explained to Piers Morgan in his ITV interview, reflecting on the massacre in Las Vegas: “You’ve had so many attacks, where there was only a gun – a bad person’s gun – going in this direction and if you had one on the other side … in fact, that’s a very big example. And if they had the bullets going in the opposite direction, you would have saved a lot of lives.”
This is a convenient lie. America’s problem is precisely that it is awash with weaponry, and, varying from state to state, it remains ludicrously easy to acquire weapons of destruction that would have been unimaginable to the founding fathers in the 18th century. Or rather, America’s problem is that too many Americans remain complacent about their nation being awash with such home armouries. The long lesson of history is that it has made Americans less, not more, safe, by comparison with every other advanced nation.
America has lost thousands of lives, including those of four of its presidents, to its infatuation with guns. There will be more. Many voices are, once again, saying “never again”. As President Obama came to realise and publicly complain, it has become a futile ritual. The calls will, as so often in the past, not be acted upon, and certainly not with a President who shows such a callous disregard for life, and a Congress that puts the safety of America’s children second, behind the Second Amendment.
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