What Trump didn’t say about Las Vegas

This editorial appeared in The San Jose Mercury News:

Is that the best you can do, Mr. President? Hours after the nation’s worst mass shooting in modern history, Donald Trump told the nation, correctly, that the slaughter was “an act of pure evil.” But then the president suggested there’s nothing to be done about mass murder on the home front by an American apparently unaffiliated with foreign terrorists.

Actually, the answers begin with toughening of the nation’s gun laws, starting with a reinstatement of the Assault Weapons Ban that was on the books for just 10 years following a 1993 massacre in the Bay Area. At 101 California St. in San Francisco, a man killed eight people and wounded six before taking his own life. It drew national attention, but by today’s standards it’s a common occurrence. That’s how numb we’ve become. Even Trump back in 2000 declared support for the ban. And in 2012 he backed President Barack Obama’s call for action following the killing of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

That was before Trump declared himself a lover of the NRA as he prepared to enter the presidential race.

Would reinstatement of the ban stop mass shootings? Of course not. But the staggering number of deaths and injuries inflicted in just minutes Sunday night reinforces the need to control proliferation of rapid-fire weaponry.

In contrast to Trump’s reaction, consider Obama’s words hours after the Orlando night club massacre 16 months ago. Obama called it “a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theatre, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

Sadly, Congress made a decision to do nothing. And Obama’s successor apparently has no inclination to do anything either.

There is much we still don’t know about the shooter’s motives. But, please, spare the rhetoric that one shouldn’t politicize this horrific event.

If we shy from politics, Congress will never act, and there will soon be yet another mass shooting record set.