Gun control — time to do it right
On March 13, 1996, at the Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland, a lone gunman barged into a class of first and second graders, randomly murdered 16 innocent children, killed their teacher and then turned the gun on himself. Scotland and the world were horrified, but outrage, alone, does nothing to fix the problem.
Instead of sitting around like President Donald Trump and his buddies — all boosted to power by the greatest gun lobby in the world, the National Rifle Association — the United Kingdom decided that such a tragedy would never happen again. It hasn’t.
Before the sadness of the Dunblane shootings had disappeared from the front page, public outrage spawned the Snowdrop Campaign — named for the flower that had bloomed in the schoolyard as the children and teacher lay dying, That movement was successful in forcing enactment of a new law. In 1997, Parliament banned all private ownership of handguns. There has never been another school shooting under the union jack, nor have mass shootings become the epidemic we have here.
Now we’re reeling from two mass murders in less than a 24-hour period, in which at least 31 people lost their lives and dozens more were maimed. In both tragedies, the gunmen used military-style assault rifles and highcapacity magazines. I and many Americans heard the president’s words, which were delivered in a somber but impressive monotone and possessed a distinctly hollow quality. Many of those words were well chosen by the best speechwriters, but because they were not the president’s words, they failed to ring true.
All POTUS could do was make excuses about who was to blame. While his own hateful rhetoric has been cited by many as one of the factors that encouraged the murders, he could not quite
get his brain around that reality, choosing instead to blame the media’s fake news, mental health, the internet and the proliferation of violent video games. Sadly, the online writings of one of the shooters used the same language Trump has viciously spewed — especially his indictment of Hispanics as “invaders” of our country. In short, the buck stops at the White House door, and Trump needs to take responsibility.
Of course, Trump expressed his shallow sympathies for the dead and bereaved, and he was careful to include a politically correct chastisement for his white supremacist supporters. But his mention of gun control centered only on finding a way to prevent the mentally ill from being able to purchase firearms. Included in his words was a lame attempt to create a bill that combines gun purchasing requirements with immigration reform. (Really!) He borrowed the trite expression of how “It is not guns that kill people. People kill people.” (Charlton Heston would have been proud.)
This is the moment for a real president, not one who prefers his Tonka toys and military parades to any attempt at being presidential. Trump has avoided the most pressing issue, and Americans are crying, “Do something.”
We need to ask, “Do we need to own assault rifles and magazines with enough firepower to leave an entire stadium dead? Should our citizens be allowed to buy easily concealable automatic handguns with high-capacity clips?” Let’s not get stuck on the rationalization that it is people, not guns, who kill. The United Kingdom has shown us how it’s done. Now it’s our turn to finally get it right.