Price paid in blood

“This isn’t a guns situation,” said US President Donald Trump.

As predictable as the rising of the sun, Republican politicians who have fought so hard against even the most basic measures to limit the bloodshed, sent out their thoughts and prayers and insisted that the last thing we should be doing right now is talking about guns.

We know they aren’t going to do anything, not even get behind measures like universal background checks that have the support of nine in 10 Americans.

What they believe is this: The unceasing, relentless, mindnumbing carnage that we in America experience because of our gun fetish? Gun advocates, a group that includes almost every elected Republican, simply do not think it’s a problem. Surely many Republicans are personally horrified by mass shootings. And sometimes they offer readings of this problem that might point to solutions — some see this as a mental health problem, for instance. But even in these cases, Republicans do not propose serious solutions to the problem.

Republicans do frequently say they want to improve the mental health system. But there are people with mental illnesses in every country, and yet we’re unique among industrialised nations in our level of gun violence. Trump did sign one law related to mental health. It revoked a regulation enacted under the Obama Administration that made it more difficult for some people with mental illnesses to buy guns.

The gun industry, the NRA, and their allies in Congress have succeeded in ensuring that there will be no new measures of any kind at the federal level to increase gun safety.