EDITORIAL The madness that never ends
Amid the horror and grief and disgust of the shooting Wednesday that left 17 dead in Parkland, Fla., it’s worth pausing to reflect on the school massacres that seemed unthinkable at the time.
On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and shot and killed 14 people, wounding 31 others. On Jan. 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy fired 106 rounds from a semiautomatic rifle at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, killing five children and wounding 32. On April 20, 1999, 15 were killed in a massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 young children and six adult staff members were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Surely, Sandy Hook would be the turning point. How could members of Congress possibly think their reflexively issued “thoughts and prayers” would be a sufficient response to the madness made possible by military-style weapons in civilian society? How could Americans possibly accept the rationale in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting that the weaponry was not the issue and to suggest otherwise was to “politicize a tragedy.”
Congress has failed to pass a single significant piece of gun-control legislation since Sandy Hook. The worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history have occurred since then: Las Vegas (58 dead on Oct. 1, 2017) and Orlando (49 dead on June 12, 2016).
And then on Wednesday came another rampage. A 19-year-old former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School armed with an AR-15-style rifle — the weapon of choice in many recent mass shootings — pulled a fire alarm, sending students pouring out of classrooms, and the slaughter ensued. It was at least the eighth U.S. school shooting causing fatalities or injuries in the first seven weeks of the year.
Thoughts and prayers are not enough.
The 1989 Cleveland Elementary School shooting led California to impose the nation’s first ban on assault weapons. In 1994, after more gun devastation, Congress passed a national assault weapons ban, but it expired in 2004, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been unable so far to reinstate it.
It is an American outrage that steps as sensible as closing loopholes on background checks or preventing suspected terrorists from purchasing guns are stymied in Congress. And so, once again, a nation endures the heartache and the furor inflicted by a deranged individual with weaponry that do not belong on our streets.