Why the mass killings in the US?
The latest multiple murder in an American school should prompt a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons to the public. But it probably won’t, and the country will endure more horrors. By
The multiple shooting in the US, this time at the private, church-related Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, is the latest in a relentlessly repetitive sequence. The willingness of the country to endure these atrocities reminds us of Kurt Vonnegut’s words as he contemplated another horror: “And so it goes.”
Another person with an emotional or psychological problem; someone bearing a grudge or an itch that can’t be scratched; or someone holding a mysterious politically charged grievance, decides the appropriate response is to go to a local school or shopping mall and begin shooting.
In most of these cases, the shooters are armed with one or more assault rifles that are almost identical to the military’s AR-15s – a weapon with maximum killing power yet lightweight and easy to maintain.
Multiple killings are not solely an American disease. There have been examples in Norway, Germany, France and elsewhere. It has become easy to forget the generation-long killing spree that has engulfed Somalia, or the too-often ignored rampant gun violence in South Africa.
It must also be footnoted in this roll call of killing the savage rage of invading armies let loose on civilians. Those forces kill old men and women, murder or abduct children, and see women as objects for sexual assault – as we have seen in Ukraine. Then there’s the seemingly never-ending inter-communal violence in the Near East.
Humans seem to find a perverse form of self-expression in killing others, it seems.
But the American version, in a nation seemingly at peace, feels somehow different owing to the frequency of the killing sprees. Each time we are hypnotised by the grotesque version of the hoary media adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Each new occurrence is reported obsessively, worldwide. And, perhaps, each new event triggers the malignant idea in others’ minds to carry out massacres.
It is too easy and too simplistic to blame the rise of ultra-violent gaming, videos, some parts of social media, and films. Such a causality implies a country filled with impressionable people who simply cannot help themselves after watching a film or playing a game, and feel compelled to rush out and kill multiple strangers. A few generations ago, with an equal lack of real evidence, it was common to blame comic books for violent pathologies.
Human nature being what it is, it is necessary to look at the tools that come easily to hand. We need to be brutally honest about it. For too many people in America, it has been an ongoing perversion of a single provision of the constitution, an amendment designed in the 1780s to ensure the continuing viability of state militias, to offer an expansive legal basis for allowing almost anyone with the cash to buy an assault rifle or two.
What we need to make clear is the lack of almost any restrictions on the purchase and ownership of an armoury like those of a country’s armed forces. Theoretically, such weapons sold to the public are not usable on the fully automatic setting for spraying dozens of bullets in a minute, but adapters can be obtained. Such a gadget was used by the Las Vegas shooter who shot dozens of people from a hotel room window.
There was a decade-long federal ban on the sale of such weapons, until 2004. But now, if you are not on a sexual offenders watch list, a convicted felon, a prisoner on the run, or someone subject to court-ordered psychiatric care, in many states you can simply show up, cash in hand, wait a day or two for a cursory check for red flags, and get the equaliser of your dreams – plus all the ammunition your twisted heart desires.
Statistics point to a rise in multi-victim killings using assault weapons since the ban on their sale was lifted. (Most deaths by firearm involve pistols or hunting rifles, but the majority of those are owing to suicides, robbery attempts or accidents.)
Public pressure is rising for something to be done about assault rifles, but a recalcitrant Republican caucus in Congress remains obdurately opposed to a new assault weapons ban – or even other substantive types of firearms regulation. CNN’s Meanwhile in America news blog noted after the killing in Nashville: “Millions of Americans have made a choice. They might not put it quite this bluntly, but if the price of keeping their high powered assault rifles is regular mass shootings, so be it.
“This reality shone through reactions on Capitol Hill to the latest massacre in an American school. Three nine-year-olds and three staff died on Monday in the rampage before 28-year-old shooter Audrey Hale was killed by police. A day later, Republican lawmakers quickly dismissed chances the horror would lead to new laws cracking down on the fast-firing battlefield weapons that do so much carnage every day in America.
“Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett told reporters that ‘laws don’t work’ to curb gun violence – despite the fact that nations with stronger gun laws have far fewer mass shootings and firearms deaths than the US. Other countries don’t have our freedom either … we’ve got incredible freedom in this country. And when people abuse that freedom, that’s what happens,” he said. Burchett argued that it is impossible to legislate away evil and called on pastors to lead a religious revival in the US.
“Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds conjured one of the most bizarre defences of high-powered weapons that tear the human body apart, telling CNN’s Manu Raju: ‘People are allowed to possess firearms and need is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t question why you need a blue suit, but you got one.’ Of course, blue suits don’t cause massacres.
“And after 130 mass shootings this year, another Republican, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, said: ‘We don’t need more gun control, we need more a**hole control.’
“The solution seems obvious. But many Republicans argue that banning assaultstyle weapons over terrible crimes would be unfair to the law-abiding Americans who want them. This is hard for non-Americans to understand, but the creed of individual
freedom runs deep in the country’s DNA. This isn’t Western Europe. Many US citizens sincerely believe they have not just a right but a need for deadly weapons to defend themselves – even against their own government. [And Republican congressmen and women see gun ownership as a cardinal element in the psyche of their voters.]
“While Republicans claim that any attempt to restrict the killing power of guns infringes the Second Amendment that guarantees the right to bear arms, they are in fact repudiating arguments of one of their greatest heroes, late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In a landmark opinion in 2008, Scalia wrote that the amendment did not confer ‘a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose’.”
It is hard to foresee much change in the way these guns are regulated or access to them is restricted, absent a thorough closet cleaning of the Republican house of horrors.
A friend in the US sent me a list of the multiple killings over the years at American schools and universities which went on to name nearly 300 institutions.
Enough already. Enough.