Easy availability of guns in US provides advantage for terrorists
When knife wielding terrorists struck in London this month, President Donald Trump expressed odd satisfaction about one aspect of the carnage. “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he tweeted. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!”
The president’s triumphal note completely overlooked the fact that Britain, unlike the United States, settled its gun debate emphatically decades ago in favor of civilian safety and tight controls. The difference in the two nations’ gun homicides is stark. The gun death rate in America is 25 times higher than other high-income nations, like Britain.
As the candidate of the National Rifle Association, however, Trump obviously prefers to discourage any debate in this country about the lethal role played by easily obtainable guns in the terrorist threat that preoccupies him.
In his obligation to protect the public, Trump would do well to note that the nation’s loophole-ridden gun laws are hailed by the Islamic State as a pro-mayhem advantage. They are described in how-to detail in the propaganda magazine Rumiyah that ISIS publishes for potential terrorists.
There, readers are informed, entirely accurately, that in America identification requirements are virtually nonexistent for buying military-style weapons from dealers online or at weekend gun shows where there is no federal jurisdiction.
“With approximately 5,000 gun shows taking place annually within the United States, the acquisition of firearms becomes a very easy matter,” the magazine says, enthused.
Britain first banned the semi-automatic guns and magazine-fed firearms favored by terrorists and other mass shooters amid a wave of national grief and resolve after 16 people were murdered in a shooting rampage in Hungerford in 1987. The laws were strengthened nine years later after 16 5- and 6-year-old children were shot to death in a Dunblane schoolhouse.
Comparable gun assaults in this country have been met by an outraged public and craven politicians yielding to the gun lobby’s propaganda.
Having clumsily raised the issue, Trump needs to know that in the years since Britain held a national gun debate and enacted laws for public safety, it has suffered only one mass shooting involving four or more victims. In this country, the FBI has found the rate of such deadly rampages has more than doubled since 2000, to more than 16 a year. Increasingly, these involve the weapons whose absence Trump, inadvertently, celebrated in his tweet.