The shock of gun violence

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the New York Times:

Only in America: A computer algorithm about guns has been created to predict who is most likely to be shot soon, or to shoot someone.

The Chicago Police Department, desperate to reduce gun violence by street gangs, authorized this unusual tool three years ago and has been using it to track and caution the most likely offenders.

It is a remarkable state of affairs that local governments must resort to such an approach to deal with the reality of gun mayhem. Yet it is sadly understandable, too, as a timid Congress cowed by the gun lobby fails to enact stronger gun-control laws for a nation increasingly flooded with highpowered weapons.

As a rule, a public anesthetized by gun abuse tends to pay attention to the ubiquity of guns when massacres seize the headlines, like the San Bernardino terrorist attack that left 14 dead, or the shooting of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut. But the full problem is far more widespread, deadly and almost routine. This is a public health challenge of critical proportions deserving a thorough debate from the presidential candidates. Yet Donald Trump, in his march toward the Republican nomination, has made a befuddling series of corkscrew turns on guns, depending on his audience. He went for full-throated Second Amendment pandering before the National Rifle Association, which endorsed him. But two days later, talking to an interviewer on national TV, not gun zealots at a convention, he backed away from his vow to ban all gun-free zones in schools on Day1 in the White House. In his latest moulting, Trump wants guns allowed only “in some cases” where teachers can be armed and trained.

Trump’s supporters should be asking where in all his tweets and thunder there is believable concern for the nation’s gun victims instead of adolescent fantasies that they would have been better off armed for a “shootout.”

David Holland PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER DIRECTORS: John A. Honderich Chair

Campbell R. Harvey Martin E. Thall Elaine B. Berger Daniel A. Jauernig Alnasir Samji David Holland Paul Weiss Phyllis Yaffe Linda Hughes Dorothy Strachan Daryl Aitken