Congress’ deadly bargain

America’s impasse on sensible gun control enables mass shootings.

For under $30, the owner of an assault-style weapon can go on a rampage like the one that claimed 10 lives at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday.

A person in this country can readily buy a magazine capable of holding 30 rounds for less than $10. A full load of .223 caliber ammunition runs around $19.50.

Not even three dollars a life. This is the bargain with death that Congress’ inaction on assault weapons has bought America.

The motivations that drive one person to go on a shooting spree may vary, but there is always one consistent factor: a gun. And often, it’s a military-style firearm designed expressly for killing many people at one time. These assault weapons have been used in at least 87 mass shootings since 1980, which have claimed 806 lives, according to data gathered by the Violence Policy Center. They stress that the number is likely an undercount.

The United States had an assault weapons ban from 1994 until it exshooting pired in 2004. Following the massacre in 2012 of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., President Barack Obama proposed what seemed like the bare minimum on gun control: universal background checks on firearms purchases, a renewed assault weapons ban, and a limit of 10 cartridges for high-capacity magazines. Congress passed none of it.

Sandy Hook did at least spur New York to curtail the proliferation of these weapons, banning certain assault-style firearms and large-capacity magazines. But as authorities investigating the Buffalo shooting describe it, all the accused shooter had to do was cross the state line to Pennsylvania to purchase a highcapacity magazine.

But there is more to the Buffalo that’s both disturbing and frustrating. According to Buffalo police, the 18-year-old suspect was questioned by State Police and held for a mental health evaluation last year for making a school shooting threat. The threat, however, was ultimately considered too general to invoke the state’s “red flag ” law, which allows a court to prohibit a person from possessing weapons. Why this threat did not raise a red flag, figuratively and literally, we have yet to learn.

We do, however, know what America has known for years: Any truly meaningful action on gun control must take place at the national level. The fundamentals President Obama offered — a new assault weapons ban, a prohibition on high-capacity magazines, and truly universal background checks — are as sound today as they were a decade ago. Yet lawmakers in one breath claim to defend the sanctity of life and in the next breath refuse to take serious action to even try to rein in this senseless carnage. Their talk is cheaper than the bargain-basement value that they and the gun industry have put on human lives.