Trump has lost his marbles on gun control
Our thoughts. Our prayers. Our tears. What does that even mean? When mass murder by gunfire in the U.S. turns into a celebrity meme.
Condolences expressed on social media, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau among those who tweeted out his sorrow for victims of the Las Vegas massacre.
To show that you’re on the side of sanity, of revulsion for a crime that wiped 59 innocents off the face of the Earth?
One can talk miles about good and evil — “an act of pure evil” as President Donald Trump described it, a sombre address clearly scripted for him because those are the only occasions where he sounds even marginally rational: The comforter-in-chief, a mantle that rests so unsuitably on his shoulders.
And then Trump got on a plane to Puerto Rico, there to hand out flashlights and such — photo op, coming face to face with the same people he’d earlier characterized as “politically motivated ingrates” — for a calamity which he claimed was nowhere near the tragedy dimensions of Hurricane Katrina. “Sixteen versus literally thousands of people.”
The death toll from Katrina a dozen years ago: More than 1,833. A “real catastrophe,” Trump chose to scold Puerto Ricans on Tuesday.
As if blaming them, Puerto Ricans, for the natural disaster that has befallen their island.
The financial drain of emergency assistance on the American treasury, Trump thought it appropriate to highlight that as well. “I hate to tell you Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.”
Less than a hundred helicopters sent to the hurricane-ravaged island, an American territory, in the abysmally slow emergency reaction by Washington. Six thousand troops deployed, compared to 10,000 on the ground in Louisiana under the command of U.S. army Lt.-Gen. Russel Honoré who, now retired, has been scathing in his indictment of the inadequate response.
Trump was scheduled to descend on Vegas next Wednesday. I can think of hardly anyone more morally unfit to bind a nation’s wounds in the aftermath of Sunday night’s slaughter by a retired accountant sniper, firing from his makeshift fortress room in the Mandalay hotel. Dozens from among the more than 500 wounded remain in critical condition.
This is the president who, in February, put his signature on a measure that nixed a regulation, initiated by his predecessor in the wake of other mass shootings, that would have kept guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people. That law required the Social Security Administration to disclose information quarterly to the national gun background check system about individuals with a documented mental illness — specifically and narrowly those receiving full benefits because of a mental illness and those requiring the assistance of third parties because they were incapable of managing their own benefits.
Even that was too much for Republicans, deeply beholden to the National Rifle Association — the NRA endorsed Trump in the last election — to swallow. (Although it should be noted that loved-by-the-lefty-left Bernie Sanders, Mr. Progressive, was so leery of alienating supporters in his rural Vermont state that he’d five times voted against the Brady Bill in the ’90s and in 2005 voted in favour of a special immunity law protecting gun makers and sellers from being sued when their weapons are used in a deadly attack.)
Gun control, yearning for it, is in fact a non-partisan issue. Respectable polling has shown that a huge majority of Americans — 94 per cent — wanted, at the very least, to restrict the mentally ill from purchasing weapons.
Vegas, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Orlando — massacres that seize a nation’s attention. But only a tiny fraction of gun deaths — about 3 per cent — are attributable to such rampages.
Mass murder in the U.S. is defined as the killing of four or more people. It’s a poor way to frame gun violence. Thirteen thousand miles away from Vegas, on the same day that Stephen Paddock sprayed a crowd of concertgoers with rapidfire lethality, three individuals were killed and two injured at the University of Kansas. It hardly merited a news digest. The numbers are staggering. So far in 2017, 326 killed in mass shootings, 432 in 2016, 369 in 2015.
Since Sandy Hook five years ago — 26 slain at an elementary school, including 20 children — there have been some 1,500 mass shootings in America, according to the Gun Violence Archive: 1,715 killed, 6,089 wounded.
And that’s just the tip of the bloodshed.
A country where it’s estimated that 300 million guns are in the hands of 320 million people, highest in gun possession among 178 countries, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, a global research agency. Americans comprise 4.4 per cent of the global population but account for fully half of civilianowned guns around the world.
Number of Americans killed in battles in all wars in history: 1,396,733. Killed by firearms in the U.S. since 1968: 1,516,863.
The war is on a homeland battlefield.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention provides these gruesome statistics: 406,496 killed by guns in the U.S. between 2001and 2013. Of those, 237,052 were suicides. Because in a society where guns are so readily available, it is the preferred means for taking one’s own life.
Homicides accounted for 153,144 of those gun deaths, 4,778 were police shootings, 8,383 categorized as “accidental” and 3,200 where no cause was determined.
Some 25 children killed by guns every week. The Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to bear arms and the intent was aimed at raising a “regulated” militia. It doesn’t guarantee the right to semiautomatic weapons, to high-powered rifles, to personal arsenals such as the 48 guns that the Vegas shooter possessed.
This is NRA-generated hokum. Such bristling caches are not for the purpose of self-defence.
There was a time when even Trump understood this. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he expressed support for a ban on assault weapons and long rifles with militarystyle features that made it easier to fire multiple rounds. In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote: “I generally oppose gun control but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.”
Two years later Trump praised president Barack Obama for introducing, after Sandy Hook, slightly tighter firearm regulations. But in the election campaign, and certainly since he assumed the Oval Office, Trump has lost his marbles on the subject of guns, even railing against government-mandated gun-free zones in places such as schools, churches and military bases. Better, he’s argued, that civilians should arm themselves against the potential of such attacks, than go down with hands empty as “target practice for the sickos.”
Maybe he knows his country better than we realize.
One final fact: After every mass shooting in America, the sale of guns spikes. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.