Opinion: America’s Great Shame Shatters Uvalde and the Country
Politicians Are Ignoring the American People on Guns
It’s happened again.
The problem with that sentence, after the horrific massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is that I could write it almost every day and it would be true.
I could have written it on May 14 after the mass shooting that killed 10 at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, N.Y.
On May 15, I could have written it twice, after a gunman killed one person and critically wounded four others at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, Calif., or after two died and three were critically wounded at a Houston flea market.
I could have written it on April 12, when a gunman wounded 10 people in Brooklyn, the worst attack on the New York subway system in decades.
I could have written it on April 3, when gunfire killed six people and wounded 12 others as they left nightclubs in Sacramento.
I could have written it on March 19, when two people got into a gunfight in Dumas, Ark., killing one bystander and injuring 27 others.
I could have written it on almost every day this year, and twice on many days. After the Tops supermarket shooting, NPR reported that the U.S. had already seen 198 mass shootings, an average of about 10 such attacks every week.
You and I probably never heard of most of those shootings. In fact, I would bet that you had forgotten at least some of the major ones I just listed. I had.
That’s the place we’ve reached in the U.S. today. We are so inured to these horrors that we say “It’s happened again,” continue what we were doing, and soon forget. We’re inexcusably numb and have mostly given up; so have many of our politicians.
I reported from Columbine in April of 1999. If you had told me that 23 years later the U.S. would have done virtually nothing to address the nightmare of school massacres and other mass shootings, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Law enforcement officials work the scene after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School where 21 people, including 19 children, were killed on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. The suspected gunman, an 18-year-old, was reportedly killed by law enforcement. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images)
Have We Surrendered Hope?
Just hours before the Uvalde massacre, the Washington Examiner published a strikingly untimely column titled “Gun control not the answer to mass shootings: Poll.” The obvious subtext was to dismiss efforts to restrict gun ownership.
The piece pointed out that 61% of likely voters surveyed by Rasmussen Reports didn’t think it was possible to “completely prevent mass shootings like the one in Buffalo.” That tightened when asked about whether undefined “gun control” could have prevented the shooting. Still, by a 50%-40% margin, those surveyed felt stricter gun restrictions wouldn’t have prevented the supermarket shooting.
You can quibble with Rasmussen’s accuracy (it has a below-average rating among pollsters according to FiveThirtyEight), but other surveys have also indicated a decline in the share of Americans who favor stricter gun laws since the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
I’m sure that trend just got upended because of Uvalde.
However, no matter what the vagaries of public opinion are or how defeatist the national mood on mass shootings is, a clear, often overwhelming majority of Americans want reasonable restrictions on guns.
Universal background checks for all gun purchases are supported by 84% of Americans (including 77% of Republicans) and opposed by only 5%, according to a March 2021 Morning Consult/Politico poll of registered voters.
A Pew Research Center survey released on April 20, 2021, found 87% of American adults support preventing people with mental issues from purchasing guns, 66% favor a federal government database to track all gun sales, 64% want to ban high capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, and 63% support a prohibition on assault-style weapons.
A March 2021 Vox/Data for Progress survey also indicated that 69% of likely voters, including 53% of Republicans, strongly or somewhat support a gun licensing program. Massachusetts, which enacted such a program, has the lowest firearm mortality rate in the continental U.S.
Even when asked the broad question of whether the country needed stricter gun laws, Pew found that a majority of Americans (53%) believed the U.S. needed stricter gun laws, as opposed to 32% who felt laws were “about right,” and 14% who thought they should be less strict.
If enacted, will all these measures eliminate mass shootings? No, but many studies have found that the assault weapons ban in 1994 resulted in a significant decrease in public mass shootings. They later increased after the ban expired in 2004. Any improvement will lead to fewer dead children.
What About the Second Amendment?
I cannot imagine that the authors of the Bill of Rights, whose wisdom created the constitutional and legal framework that fostered America’s greatness, could have envisioned our current free-for-all on guns.
And it is a free-for-all, when compared to the countries with the lowest rates of violent gun deaths worldwide. As the following NPR chart shows, the U.S. rate is hundreds of times worse than that of Singapore or Japan, and 99 times deadlier than the U.K.
Courtesy: NPR.
The Supreme Court has ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm. However, the court has also ruled that the sale, purchase, and use of firearms can be regulated, just as automobiles and boats are regulated.
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other founders of this great nation could not have wanted or foreseen that the Bill of Rights would be bastardized to the point of allowing the mentally ill and teenagers to walk around with weapons that can fire multiple rounds per second.
More important, today’s Americans do not want that.
A U.S. Secret Service officer lowers the American flag to half staff over the White House in Washington D.C., following the recent mass shooting at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday, May 24, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
No rational human being can think it makes any sense that an 18-year-old who can’t even drink under Texas law, could purchase assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and massacre teachers and 10-year-olds in an elementary school.
No rational human being could have foreseen a United States where it was easier for most adults to buy a semi-automatic rifle than to buy baby formula.
I don’t know how we solve this crisis.
But I do know that if this country and its politicians cannot come together to agree on reasonable measures to address the problem, innocents will keep dying.
And I will be able to write that it’s happened again, almost every day.
We should all be ashamed.
Cover photo: A girl cries, comforted by two adults, outside the Willie de Leon Civic Center where grief counseling will be offered in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, May 24, 2022. A teenage gunman killed 19 young children in a shooting at an elementary school in Texas, in the deadliest US school shooting in years. (Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty Images)
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