A culture of unbridled access to firearms is fast turning the United States, ordinarily identified with some level of sanity and civility, into a society marred by gun violence and posing serious threats to human life. The irony is that a culture which took its origins mainly from the use of guns as weapons of self-defence has now been turned into a nightmare that sees innocent people regularly massacred. America should heal itself.
A typical example is the October 1 incident in Las Vegas, Nevada, where 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant and high-stakes gambler, opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 rollicking concert goers, taking at least 58 lives and injuring over 500 others. In a gory incident that has continued to tug at the heartstrings, the man let off volleys at the crowd from a vantage position on the 32nd floor of a hotel suite, where he had been lodging for days, before eventually turning the weapon upon himself.
Sadly, tragic incidents of this nature – though not necessarily of this magnitude – have become routine in every part of that country. According to a 2016 BBC report, there were 372 cases of mass shooting in the US in 2015, resulting in 475 deaths and 1,870 people injured. The report, quoting Mass Shooting Tracker, a group that catalogues shooting incidents, defined the phenomenon as “a single shooting incident which kills or injures four or more people.”
Going by these figures, it means there was more than one incident per day for that year. But beyond just mass shooting, gun-related death is a reality of everyday life in the US. Another report by Gun Violence Archive, a not for profit organisation, has it that 13,286 cases of gun violence took place there that year, besides incidents relating to suicide shooting. About 26,819 sustained gunshot injuries during the period. Yet, there was still room for additional figures as those provided did not cover the tail end of the year.
Last year also came with another heart-rending incident, when an Islamist, Omar Mateen, went into a gay nightclub at Orlando, Florida, with an assault rifle and a handgun and started spraying the crowd with bullets. By the time the 29-year-old, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, was done, 49 people lay dead, with dozens more critically injured in what was then the deadliest shooting incident in America.
It has been a crazy world, where life is worth nothing, once the guns get into the hands of some psychopaths ready to vent their fury on the rest of the society. Back in 2012, a 20-year-old, Adam Lanza, walked into the Sandy Hooks Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, heavily armed. Minutes after, 26 people lay dead, 20 of them children, in the second deadliest US school shooting, next only to the 32 that died in the 2007 shooting in the Virginia Tech (Polytechnic) campus.
A research by Politifact, a US fact-checking website, produced yet another chilling statistics indicating that, between 1968 and 2011, the US recorded 1.4 million firearms deaths, a number much higher than the country had recorded in all the wars it had fought from Independence to the Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991. Computations put all the war casualties at 1.2 million.
The Route 91 Harvest country music incident in Las Vegas has been described as the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Yet, previous experiences have taught the world not to expect any serious response to stop a future occurrence. The incident, as usual, has brought back the age-old debate about the need for gun control, which has always been met with staunch resistance by gun activists, especially the powerful lobby group, the National Rifle Association, and members of the congressional Republicans.
Besides, Americans trace their rights to gun ownership to a provision in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” But does the need for self-defence explain how Paddock was able to amass up to 33 high-powered weapons, 23 of them in his hotel suite, in the last 13 months? About 12 of those weapons were fitted with bump-stocks for rapid firing, as would a machine gun.
Why the man who owned two planes and was a licensed pilot took to mass murder may remain in the realm of conjecture, but what is certain is the fact that if there had been sufficient restrictions on gun ownership, he would not have found it so easy to build up his infamous arsenal. For instance, Gun Violence Archives noted that the number of gun violence per capita in the US in 2012 was nearly 30 times that of the United Kingdom. It also noted that 60 per cent of murders in the country that year were by firearms, while Canada was 31 per cent, Australia, 18.2 per cent, and UK, 10 per cent.
The U.S. must face the reality of the Second Amendment as more of a concern to the rest of the world. It is reported that a growing number of countries are warning their citizens about taking trips to the United States. European governments have consistently been warning about a spate of gun violence in the U.S. For a country credited with about 300 million guns, almost a gun to an individual, it is difficult to find any solutions to gun violence other than the regulation of gun ownership. Yet, a Barack Obama era regulation that made it difficult for people with mental illness to purchase a gun was rolled back after Donald Trump, the president, signed a bill to that effect in February. Such policy decisions come with a price, this time paid for with human blood. A country cannot pretend to be rational when it spends over $1 trillion yearly to defend itself against terrorism, which kills only a fraction of its citizens that are killed through domestic gun violence.
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