America won’t control its guns

If there’s one word that explains the biggest difference between Canada and the United States today, it isn’t “Trump,” it’s “guns.”

The shooting deaths of 17 people and the wounding of 14 others at a Florida high school Wednesday was merely the latest in a chain of atrocities committed by Americans who had too easy access to guns, often too many guns and especially absurdly powerful, automatic guns.

Beyond this, the massacre was just the latest evidence of the shameful failure of U.S. politicians to control the guns that make America seem, for so much of the world, an armed, anarchic state. Gun control, in the U.S., is an oxymoron. In many countries, certainly those with a claim to be civilized, a heavily armed, seemingly disturbed teen who slaughtered former peers and at least one teacher at his old high school would have committed an exceptional, once-in-a-century, possibly never-to-berepeated crime.

Yet we’re talking about America. Guns-R-U.S.

This week’s carnage at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was just one more very bad day when a lot of Americans died, a lot more wept and, in the face of new calls for gun control, a president shrugged.

To be sure, it was worse than the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, which claimed the lives of 12 students and one teacher.

But 26 people died in a hail of bullets in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last November.

Last October, a meticulously planned assault on a Las Vegas concert left 58 people dead.

Nor is Parkland the deadliest American school shooting. A 20-year-old gunman killed 20 young children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Parkland was hardly unique, and that compounds its tragedy.

It ranks as the eighth deadliest attack in modern American history.

Meanwhile, according to Everytown For Gun Safety, it is the 18th school shooting in America so far this year and the 290th since 2013.

The cure for this distinct, American pathology would seem simple. Gun control.

Pass laws to strictly limit the kinds of firearms being sold as well as who can buy them.

The gun used at Parkland this week, as in many recent American mass-shootings, was an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

This weapon, which is highly restricted in Canada, typically has a large magazine, shoots rounds at a higher velocity than a handgun and leaves more complex wounds in victims. No civilian needs one.

Yet the suspect in the Parkland massacre, 19year-old Nikolas Cruz, legally obtained one last year and kept it, despite alarms over his troubled state of mind.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump talked about addressing mental illness, but not gun control. Nothing will change after Parkland. It never will. Access to guns is a constitutionally-guaranteed, American constitutional disorder — part of their DNA. They are prisoners of their history.

As for Canadians gazing south of the border, on days like this America seems not just another country but a different planet.

Yet we’re talking about America. Guns-R-U.S.