THE recent twin mass shooting incidents in the United States throw up a fresh challenge to the country’s authorities over the need to act swiftly to save innocent people from periodic carnage by some deranged fellows that may be harbouring some perceived grudges against society. More than any period before, this is the time for a nation in distress to unite in condemnation of racism, one of the reasons for its ugly history of gun violence. It is also the time to heal the soul and to reassure the people that it will not happen again or, in the event of attempting to do so, the culprits will not be able to pull it off that easily.
But it is doubtful if the country will be courageous enough to seize the moment, not only to act decisively, but differently from what it had been known for. The doubt, which stems from past experiences, has already been expressed by the president, Donald Trump, who is trying to pull the wool over the issue by saying, “Mental illness and hate pull the trigger, not the gun.” By trying to bring up such a fine line of distinction, he is trying to introduce confusion over an issue that has become a national embarrassment, with a troubled country like Venezuela already issuing warnings to its citizens against travelling to the US for safety reasons.
No doubt, America is a country roiled by incessant gun violence, the latest of which took place last weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton in Ohio, both within 13 hours. But rather than come up with gun control measures that will limit access to gun and its abuse, many people, especially from Trump’s Republican Party and members of the National Rifle Association, prefer to hide behind the Second Amendment of the constitution, which guarantees people the right to keep and bear guns. But in a situation of unbridled access to guns, it is absolutely impossible to prevent the weapons from falling into wrong hands, as was the case at the weekend.
In El Paso, a gunman, identified as Patrick Crusius, simply walked into an outlet of Walmart, an American multinational retailer, and opened fire in a crowded area. By the time he was through, the 21-year-old man, who travelled 1,046 kilometres from Allen, a Dallas suburb, to El Paso to carry out his heinous crime, had taken the lives of 21 innocent shoppers, leaving 26 others injured. Some hours later, another gunman, 24-year-old Connor Betts, in a similar manner, claimed nine lives, including his sister’s, before he was taken out.
The good thing is that the security was alert; in both incidents, the police were able to respond in double-quick time, especially in Dayton, where they were able to take out Betts in 30 seconds. That, perhaps averted what the police chief, Richard Biehi, said “would have been catastrophic injury and loss of life.” But the fatalities in the twin incidents, taken together, have already registered as one of the deadliest mass shooting cases in the country’s history.
The issue of gun control has often polarised Americans. But after the incident of October 1, 2017, when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant and high-stakes gambler, opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 rollicking concert-goers in Las Vegas, Nevada, resulting in 500 casualties, including 58 fatalities, it was thought that far-reaching measures would be introduced to forestall a reoccurrence. It was the deadliest of such incidents in America’s modern history.
Yet, not much was achieved except that early this year, the Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a universal background check bill, to which the Republican-controlled Senate has yet to concur. This is the time for the Senate to cut short its recess and vote on the matter. If the bill finally becomes a law, it will make it very difficult for certain groups of people to have access to guns and will also ban access to certain categories of high calibre guns.
Indeed, this is the least that is expected of a country that has already recorded 251 incidents of mass shooting in 216 days of this year. This is almost one mass shooting incident per day, according to Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organisation.
In the past, America had witnessed mass killings that threw the whole country into bereavement. Aside from the Las Vegas shooting that resulted in 58 deaths, 49 people were killed at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, with 53 others injured when gunman, Omar Mateen, opened fire on his mainly gay victims. The shooting in Sandy Hooks Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six teachers were killed in 2012, was also an incident that shook the nation to its foundation. In all the cases, there was an outpouring of rage, outrage and condemnation, after which there was quietude as if people waited for when the next mass shooting would take place.
America has to take a lesson from what happened in other places. After Thomas Hamilton, 43, walked into a school gym in Dunblane, Scotland, and sprayed bullets around, killing 16 children and their teacher, a massive campaign was launched for tighter gun control. This resulted in a change in the law a year later, making it illegal to buy or possess a handgun. In Christchurch, New Zealand, where a gunman killed 51 worshippers in a mosque, a gun buy-back process has begun. Legal gun owners are to return their military-style semi-automatic weapons, which were banned after the incident, in exchange for cash. The scheme is estimated to cost the police authorities $207 million.
Trump, who has been accused of preaching racial hatred, has to start behaving like a true leader, a unifying agent, given the multi-coloured society that he presides over. Although he has condemned the white supremacists believed to be behind the shooting, he has to move beyond condemnation. He has to act.
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