What is to be done about US gun scourge?

If I had a magic wand, an immensely powerful magic wand, I would just wave it and make all the guns in the United States, my home country, disappear. Problem solved. Maybe. In 2016, the State of Florida had 1,111 murders with a murder rate of 5.4 per 100,000 people, according to data from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The data is not broken down by county, but Miami-Dade County, which is nearby Parkland High School, has a murder rate of about 12 per 100,000. So with a total of 2,700,000 people, we can estimate that there are roughly 325 murders per year, 27 per month, in Miami-Dade. Sadly, the 17 students killed at Parkland will hardly make a blip in the murder statistics.

Other cities — Chicago, Washington, Baltimore — are even worse. In Baltimore, Maryland, just 50 kilometers from the nation’s capital, there were 343 murders last year, in a city of only 620,000 people. That’s a murder rate of 55 per 100,000.

China has one of the lowest murder rates in the world — 0.7 per 100,000 — tying with Germany and Switzerland. It’s a pleasure to live in a place where there are practically no guns. Last year, in all of China, there were only 94 “gun-related crimes”. In Beijing, I’ve never felt any fear of street crime.

Police don’t usually carry guns here.

To be fair, I never really worried about being murdered when I lived in the US. Most of the crime, especially murder, is concentrated in a few inner city neighborhoods. It’s a national scandal that we don’t protect the people who live in those neighborhoods, almost all of whom are decent and lawabiding, from the murderous thugs who torment them. These killings don’t make the news because they happen all the time.

In the 1950s and ’60s, crime rates in the US were much lower. There was one mass shooting in 1966, at the University of Texas. But, almost all have happened since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. Now, they seem to be a frequent occurrence. What changed?

These tragedies were not caused by any rise in gun ownership. According to surveys conducted by the University of Chicago, funded by the National Science Foundation, the percentage of households with guns fell from 43 percent in 1973 to 34 percent in 2013.

I fear that the heart of the problem is a growing crudeness in our society. The 1950s and ’60s were far from perfect. There was terrible racism, often supported by law. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson exploited women who worked for them in ways far beyond what we’ve seen from leaders in recent decades. Movie stars doubtless did things that would shame the Kardashians. But, at least people at that time felt they had to cover this up to at least appear to meet society’s standards.

Now, the crudeness is glorified. Popular rap music promotes violence and degrades women. In video games, young people get points for killing. Movies are often extremely violent and depict people with no moral core. Hollywood stars wildly cheer when giving an Academy Award to Roman Polanski, who gave drugs and alcohol to a 13-year-old girl and then raped her.

Is it plausible that adolescents who spend many of their waking hours looking at this stuff are not affected by it?

In reality, I don’t have a magic wand. I don’t know how to eliminate either the mass killings or the everyday murders.

I’m afraid that my society has deep problems that we might not be able to fix.