American carnage comes to the Las Vegas strip
In a country of 320 million people and almost as many guns, it is never too long before another mass shooting sets yet another deadly record, warping the nation’s sense of safety, breaking hearts and scarring its soul.
On Monday, the nation again awoke to intolerable news: A man in a 32nd-floor room of a Las Vegas hotel had opened fire on a concert below, killing at least 59 and injuring more than 500.
Of all the nation’s many mass shootings, the four deadliest have occurred in the past decade: Virginia Tech (2007), Sandy Hook Elementary (2012), the Pulse nightclub (2016). And now this unspeakable act.
Though settings and details differ — at 64, the Las Vegas shooter was by far the oldest of the killers — each slaughter was perpetrated by a single individual, using firearms designed to inflict mass casualties.
“American carnage” was a major theme in President Trump’s inaugural address. To him, this carnage involved immigrants stealing our jobs, foreign countries stealing our companies, and foreign terrorists threatening our safety.
But the true American carnage is made in the USA: the gun violence that claims 93 lives on an average day, and many more on a day like Sunday. America has about 4.4% of the world’s popula- tion, 42% of its civilian-owned guns and a number of spree killings unheard of in other nations.
In Australia, it took one mass attack — a gunman killing 35 people at a seaside resort in 1996 — for the government to enact sweeping gun safety measures, including a massive gun buyback. Firearm homicides plunged by nearly 60% over the next decade, firearm suicides by an even larger percentage. And there hasn’t been a mass shooting of more than four people since.
In America, the Second Amendment protects gun ownership, but it allows for reasonable regulation. After every mass shooting, the refrain from the gun lobby is the same: Whatever measures are proposed would not have stopped that particular shooting.
But solutions don’t have to match a particular shooting. They simply need to limit future carnage while balancing constitutional rights.
Many proposals would do just that: Keep weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill and those with violent or criminal records; impose universal background checks on buyers; and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Yet no matter what occurs in the U.S. — not the slaughter of 20 first-graders in 2012, or the massacre of 49 people in a nightclub last year — Congress rejects every commonsense effort at change. In fact, this month the House is poised to vote on a measure to make armor-piercing ammunition tougher to regulate and silencers easier to get.
The president offered appropriately soothing words Monday, summoning “the bonds that unite us: our faith, our family and our shared values” in response to “an act of pure evil.”
One way to honor the Las Vegas victims is for the nation’s leaders to go beyond shock and sadness, to come together to take overdue steps that won’t prevent all mass shootings but will at least make them less frequent.