USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: If foreign terrorists attacked, Congress would act
America’s passion for military-style firearms, combined in at least one case with the ideology of hate, unleashed a fresh torrent of death sentences with ruthless efficiency in recent days.
Jordan Anchondo, 25, was shopping for school supplies Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso when she suddenly faced the climactic choice of shielding her 2-month-old from a man with an assault-style rifle. The baby boy survived. Anchondo paid with her life. More than 20 others were gunned down and two dozen wounded.
Barely 13 hours later, Nicholas Cumer, 25, who had just finished an internship helping cancer patients in Dayton, Ohio, was enjoying an evening out with friends at a popular entertainment district when he was gunned down by a man wearing body armor and carrying an AR-15-style rifle with a drum magazine that can hold 100 rounds. The gunman killed nine and wounded more than two dozen.
A week earlier, there was Keyla Salazar, just short of turning 14, enjoying a summer of Disneyland and the promise of a new puppy. Her life ended at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California. Keyla’s 19-year-old killer used an AK-47-style rifle and killed two others, including a boy age 6, and wounded at least 12.
These were just the most recent casualties of the nation’s gun violence epidemic. In 216 days of this year, there have been 251 mass shootings leaving 520 dead and 2,000 wounded. And yet Congress does nothing to try to stem the carnage.
If a foreign terror organization exploiting weaknesses in the nation’s defenses launched three attacks on America in a week, you can be damn sure Congress would cut short its recess to act.
With each new slaughter, hard lessons are ever more glaring:
❚ The tired, pro-gun trope that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” simply doesn’t apply. Good (and brave) police responded to shootings in Gilroy and Dayton in less than a minute and prevented even greater tragedy. But such is the lethality of assault rifles, where a high-velocity round fires as rapidly as a trigger is pulled, that the dead and wounded accumulated within seconds.
❚ Only a federal ban on militarystyle weapons and high-capacity magazines will work. The Gilroy gunman couldn’t legally acquire his firearm in California, so he simply crossed the border into Nevada.
❚ A sensible interim step is a federal minimum age of 21 for the purchase and possession of high-velocity rifles. President Donald Trump is in favor. Such an age restriction exists for alcohol. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell believes it is necessary for the purchase of tobacco. Why not for the favorite weapon of mass shootings?
Many will be quick to blame much of this violence on Trump’s amped up, nativist takedown of migrants, minority neighborhoods and people of color serving in Congress. Certainly along a spectrum of those harboring dark thoughts on race who feel validated by such rhetoric, and who find and incite each other online, there lurk those prone to violence. Police have learned that the alleged El Paso shooter, a 21year-old white man, posted online a racist, anti-immigrant screed that echoed some of Trump’s language.
On Monday, with a teleprompter from the White House, Trump said the right words: “Our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” But on Twitter, Trump blamed “Fake News” for contributing to the all-too-real body count and absurdly suggested linking two notoriously difficult issues, background checks and immigration reform.
Ultimately, it is the nexus of deranged individuals (typically alienated young men) and America’s love affair with guns that lies at the heart of this crisis. The United States is no more violent, racially divided or mentally ill than other nations. It simply has more guns. Less than 5% of the world’s population owns 42% of the firearms.
No, new laws won’t stop all mass shootings. But commonsense restrictions, such as universal background checks and bans on easy access to weapons of war, can make these massacres less likely and less lethal.