An American nightmare
The madness of gun carnage, and the timidity of politicians
The latest worst mass shooting in American history — a distinction now conferred with frightening frequency — isn’t likely to lead Congress to make such slaughters more difficult. If our grimly repetitive recent history is any indication, it will at best force lawmakers to delay their latest effort to enable the killing.
It’s a testament to the post-factual nature of the nation’s gun politics that a bill to lift restrictions on silencers, last delayed out of a modicum of respect for a congressman who was nearly shot to death, was poised to proceed again before Stephen Paddock used high-powered firearms to kill more than 50 people attending a concert on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night. As the Chronicle reported that morning, devices that muffle the sound of gunshots would make it harder for police to locate a shooter like Paddock, who murdered his victims from a 32nd-floor hotel room about a quarter-mile away.
Nor was that the only loosening of the nation’s already permissive gun laws that Washington was considering on the eve of the latest massacre. The provision to ease the long-standing silencer restrictions is part of broader legislation that would also legalize more armorpiercing ammunition and open more public and private lands to shooting. Another bill poised to move forward would allow more concealed firearms to be brought into states such as California that restrict them. The gunmakers who push such legislation enjoyed the usual surge in their stock prices in the wake of the latest mass shooting.
Congress is long past the point when it banned particularly dangerous weapons or considered patching the gaping holes in the national background-check system, which even a horrific elementary school shooting in Connecticut couldn’t bring about. On the contrary, lawmakers have shown a determination to help deadly weapons infiltrate every corner of the country, and they have maintained that stance in the face of relentless and increasingly deadly shootings.
The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting became the nation’s deadliest by surpassing a mass killing at a Killeen, Texas, restaurant 16 years earlier. Nine years after that, last year’s Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando eclipsed Virginia Tech. Now that record has held for all of 16 months.
Mass shootings that don’t break records, meanwhile, are routine. The Gun Violence Archive has recorded 273 shootings with at least four victims this year — about one a day. Las Vegas wasn’t even the only American mass shooting of the day; another, in downtown Lawrence, Kan., killed three and injured two.
Such multiple shootings underscore the added toll of the sort of high-powered firearms that once fell under the federal assault weapons ban. But they account for only a small fraction of Americans killed by firearms, who number more than 11,000 this year. On Sunday alone, gunfire took the lives of a 23-year-old man found in an upstate New York park; a Louisiana police officer responding to a crime at a convenience store; a Chicago man who was one of half a dozen shot in the city over a 24-hour period; a man shot along with a woman in the parking lot of a Phoenix area sports bar; and the victim of a drive-by in Chico.
The Las Vegas killer, a retiree who does not appear to have had a criminal history, will be united with every one of his long line of predecessors not by his motive, creed, race, nationality, or particular sickness, but only by his ability to obtain extremely deadly weapons. It’s revolting enough that our leaders, who are quick to take every precaution against the far more remote threat of foreign terrorism, can’t find the courage to make it a little harder to amass such an arsenal. That they keep making it easier is an absurdity and an outrage.