Blood on their hands
ANOTHER day, another mass shooting at a school in the United States. Seventeen people were killed when a teenager opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The victims, both teachers and pupils, were aged between 14 and 47.
The number of fatalities made it the deadliest US school shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, when 20 children and six staff were killed. More strikingly, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is the 17th school shooting of the year. Yes, you read that correctly: there have been 17 incidents involving guns at American schools in the past 45 days.
The person responsible for yesterday’s carnage has already confessed to the killings. He is 19year-old Nikolas Cruz, a troubled teenager who had become even more depressed after his adopted mother died last year. His social media profile offered disturbing signs about his volatile mind and violent intentions, which prompted his being reported to the FBI.
According to media reports, Cruz had posted pictures of dead animals that he had killed, and threatened police and anti-fascists. The Anti-Defamation League claim Cruz had ties to white supremacists, which may explain his vitriolic abuse of blacks and Muslims. Most telling of all, five months ago Cruz stated his aspiration to become a “professional school shooter”. He had been barred from school for bringing in bullets and other threatening behaviour.
Yet even with such a troubled history, the teenager was able to legally purchase and keep an AR-15: a lightweight, semiautomatic assault rifle. Bizarrely, the US allows a teenager to buy a military-style assault rifle at 18, while insisting you have to be 21 before you can buy beer.
While I have every sympathy for those who have lost loved ones during this latest attack, it is hard to feel anything but rage for the US administration that continues to allow such events to continue month on month, year on year without taking any significant action. Last November, a gunman opened fire at a church in Texas, killing 26. The previous month, Stephen Paddock barricaded himself into a hotel room in Las Vegas with an arsenal of weapons, which he used to slaughter 58 people and injure a further 851 people. Such incidents are par for the course in the US.
They can protest all they like, but those who continue to advocate the right to bear arms and prevent important measures to restrict gun use have direct responsibility for these murders. The stats speak for themselves. Mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the US — 4,000 more than in 2015. Researching FBI stats, Associated Press found that of these deaths, some 11,000 were homicides in 2016, and about 9,600 the year before.
It hasn’t helped that the one piece of gun-related legislation President Trump undertook was to roll back vital restrictions of gun ownership for those with mental illness. The measure, first introduced by President Obama, was repealed by Trump last February meaning that the Social Security Administration no longer has to disclose information on a quarterly basis to the national gun background check system about people with mental illness.
Granted, although the list of possible mental disorders was long, from anxiety to schizophrenia, the checks only targeted a specific group people: those on full disability benefits due to mental illness. As such, many shooters may have still slipped through the net. But the point is, instead of making it harder for those with known mental health issues to access weapons, Trump prefers no action.
And yet he took to Twitter yesterday to post: “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
To what end? Cruz had a known record of mental health issues, he was repeatedly reported to the authorities, but what could they do given he had the constitutional right to bear arms?
Let’s look at another country culturally similar to the US, which adopted a very different approach to gun control. Australians, like Americans, love guns. Yet events in April 1996 made them take unprecedented action. Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old with a troubled past, turned up at a café in Port Arthur, a tourist town on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, killing 35 people and wounding another 28. The incident horrified the public and galvanised the Australian government into action.
John Howard, Australia’s prime minister at the time, quickly grasped that it was way too easy for Australians to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. He persuaded the centre-right coalition to pass sweeping reforms. The National Firearms Agreement (NFA) brought in tough new rules for gun ownership, a new registry to track guns across the country, and made firearms permits compulsory.
Perhaps the most significant NFA provision was its outright ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government also went after those already in circulation by introducing a mandatory buy-back. Some 650,000 weapons — an estimated 20 per cent of all privately owned firearms at the time – were lawfully recovered and destroyed.
The action halved the number of gun-related suicides and homicides in Australia, and this in a country when firearms-related deaths were already low. A table on Wikipedia shows that in 2013, there were an estimated 22 guns for every 100 Australians and just 0.16 per cent gun-related homicides. In comparison, in 2014 the US had 101 guns for every 100 Americans, while homicides made up 6 per cent of all firearms-related deaths.
As we know from terror attacks across Europe, where vehicles have been used to kill people, no amount of legislation can prevent entirely those intent on committing murder. But for those in power to do absolutely nothing to minimise the risks is criminal. Indeed, for the US, it is safe to say they have the blood of those victims on their hands.