Tim Newark
dead. Legislation to ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines and expand background checks was defeated in 2013 in a Senate when, it should be noted, the Democrats were in the majority. A Republican proposal to expand permission to carry concealed weapons and prosecute more gun crimes was defeated at the same time by the Democrats.
The Democrats may well be beating the drum for gun control now but when Obama was in power it has been claimed there were 162 mass shootings, many more than under the previous four presidents. Other sources say that between 1982 and 2011 there was a mass shooting once every 200 days. Under Obama this accelerated to one every 64 days. In 2015 guns killed 13,286 people in the US.
In the final days of Obama’s administration he did pass a regulation aimed at stopping people with mental disorders from buying guns but in reality it did not extend the number of people already covered by law, merely establishing a new data bank for background checks, and Congress rescinded it.
It is up to Trump now to stop the war zone erupting on American streets and in schools. From the way he instinctively gave a thumbs-up to the angry father in the White House calling for him to “fix it”, it may well appeal to his no-nonsense business attitude to strike a bipartisan agreement on this.
He has already offered a ban on the bump stock accessory that turned the guns used in the Las Vegas shooting into fully automatic killing machines. Obama’s administration failed to regulate these devices.
Trump is also backing a law to enforce background checks but will it be strong enough? It can’t be right for a suspected terrorist to be on a no-fly list and an FBI watch list but can freely obtain a gun.
Trump is surely right to wonder why the FBI, who had been given good warning about the threat posed by the Florida school killer, did nothing about it. Although a little crass his tweet struck home that maybe they were too busy investigating his alleged links with Russia rather than concentrating on back-to-basics work.
Catching real bad guys before they commit terrible crimes is possibly the greatest challenge our society faces. How willing are we to allow law enforcement officers to intervene and remove from our streets potentially very dangerous people?
THE US is not alone in this. Our authorities got tip-offs about the Manchester bomber, while MI5 had the London Bridge attackers under surveillance, yet still they committed mass murder. Are we willing to be a little less liberal in our laws and intern people who present a clear and present danger? There are as many as 23,000 “subjects of interest”, as our security forces call them, walking British streets.
Having listened to the families of the victims of the Florida slaughter, Trump said: “It’s not going to be talk like it has been in the past.”
He wants to go down in history as the president who does things. A man of action who cuts through political rhetoric to give the people what they want. Hopefully his colossal vanity will impel him to finally strike a deal that will reduce the number of young and old Americans slaughtered by gun wielding madmen.
‘Must stop the war zone erupting in the streets’