WHY DO MASS GUN ATTACKS HAPPEN MOSTLY IN THE U.S.?

 

…Former President Obama after the Sandy Hook massacre where a young person, Adam Lanza, killed 20 First Graders and 5 adult teachers and aides.  Lanza had already killed his mother.  He used an M16 Assault Rifle, and he fired-off 154 rounds in less than 5 minutes

 

Returning from Buffalo in the aftermath of the latest massacre, President Biden said there was “not much I can do using executive action

 

 

On this day, Gabrielle Giffords huddled with Vice President Joe Biden in his private office just off the Senate floor on an April Wednesday in 2013, yes, 9 years ago.  They were watching the stunning defeat of a bill to expand background checks to most gun sales.

Giffords, a former Democratic lawmaker who still had difficulty speaking after she was shot in the head in 2011 during an event in her Arizona district.  She showed equal parts that were furious and devastated as she had watched 46 of her former colleagues, including five Democratic senators, vote against the gun-control measure informally known as the Manchin-Toomey Bill.

The gun bill had emerged in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., just four months prior.  It was the above mentioned massacre that left 20 children and six adults dead. Now it was clear that not even 20 slaughtered first-graders would move the nation to change its gun laws.

Biden empathized with Giffords, telling her he understood how painful it was to see the defeat of the background check measure negotiated by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), said Peter Ambler.  He had joined Giffords’s congressional staff just five days before she was shot and now is the executive director of Giffords, a group devoted to fighting gun violence.

Why is American masculinity at the center of gun culture, but not the gun debate?  A very good question, with no good answer.

Biden also offered an encouraging note, telling Giffords the failed vote would infuriate the American people and spur them to take action to prevent gun violence: “This is actually going to help you build a movement,” Ambler recalled Biden saying.  But it did none of that.

Biden’s optimism was seriously misplaced. Since Sandy Hook, our nation has experienced more than 3,500 mass shootings.  This is according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks gun violence and defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are killed or injured.

The shootings have touched nearly every imaginable slice of American life: A Black church in Charleston, S.C. (2015). A government-funded nonprofit center in San Bernardino, Calif. (2015). A gay nightclub in Orlando (2016). A country music festival in Las Vegas (2017). A high school in Parkland, Fla. (2018). A synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018). A Walmart in majority-Hispanic El Paso, followed just hours later by a shooting in a popular nightlife corridor in Dayton, Ohio (2019). Asian American massage businesses in Atlanta (2021).

Then on May 14, a racist attack at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo left 10 dead and thrust mass shootings back into the news.

And then again on Tuesday, at least 19 students and two teachers were killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., about 80 miles west of San Antonio. The alleged gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was apparently killed by police officers at the scene.

In the nearly decade-long stretch between Sandy Hook and Buffalo and Uvalde, congressional efforts to change gun policies in any significant way have repeatedly failed, despite lawmakers occasionally commencing gun-control discussions anew in the wake of particularly harrowing gun tragedies. And Biden has played a central role in many of those unsuccessful efforts, first as vice president under Barack Obama and now as president.

Biden frequently touts his role in passing a 1994 assault weapons ban, but that bill included a 10-year “sunset” clause, meaning the law automatically expired in 2004 after Congress did not renew it.

After Sandy Hook, Obama made Biden his point person on guns. Biden led a team that proposed nearly two dozen executive actions on guns that Obama signed, but he also oversaw the failed Manchin-Toomey effort.

Now as president, Biden has yet to receive from the Democratic-controlled Congress any major piece of legislation aimed at preventing mass shootings. Most Republicans remain opposed to any proposed changes, arguing that new restrictions would have little impact on the frequency of mass shootings and would impinge on Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms.  But 50 Republicans, directed by their leader, Senator Mitch McConnel (R-KY) to refuse to let any gun control measure, even

Returning from Buffalo in the aftermath of the latest massacre, Biden said there was “not much on executive action” that he could carry out on gun control and, referring to the 1994 assault weapons ban, said, “I’ve got to convince the Congress that we should go back to what I passed years ago.”

He also acknowledged the political head winds he was still facing, nearly a decade after Sandy Hook.

“The answer is going to be very difficult,” Biden added before boarding Air Force One to fly back to Washington. “It’s going to be very difficult. But I’m not going to give up trying.”

 Copyright G. Ater 2022