OUR ALLIES THINK AMERICA ALLOWS MASSACRE OF CHILDREN

 

                                   …The Uvalde, Texas Elementary School massacre memorial.

 

Most other democracies have only one-fifth of the homicides, as does America

 

The slaughter of American children should bring the country together in mourning.  This was said by The Times of U.K. in an editorial.  That’s why mass shootings in Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and elsewhere inspired “prompt reform” of most countries’ gun laws.

Take the 1987 Hungerford Massacre in Great Britain, when an armed man cut down 16 people before killing himself.  After that senseless horror, the U.K. banned nearly all semiautomatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns, as well as any exploding ammunition.  Plenty of Brits still own guns, half a million of those in England and Wales alone.  Yet because they require licensing and background checks, which include examining  applicants social media, only 4% of British homicides involve guns.  Their overall homicide rate is one-fifth that of America.  

The U.S. though, claims there is nothing it can do, even as mass shootings increase.  Last week when a young man killed 19 children and two teachers in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school,  That was as right after a white supremacist killed 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocer store.  In the U.S., such shootings don’t bring national soul-searching.  They instead cause bickering and hand wringing. 

It's the guns:  More guns more homicides, said Meret Bauman in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung (Switzerland). Most rich countries, including Japan, Australia, and most all of Europe, have gun control and boast homicide rates of less than 1.5 per 100,000 citizens, some even less that 1.  America’s rate is approaching 8 per 100,000.  This worse than Niger, Pakistan and Myanmar.  The U.S in fact, has a frightening 120 guns for every 100 people, “more than any other country”.  The young gunman in Uvalde Texas was able to buy an AR15 assault rifle plus 400 rounds of amo with no training, the very day after his 18^th birthday.  That single fact “should set off alarm bells.  But such behavior is not even questioned in the U.S..”

Why can’t America be more like Australia?  Asked The Sydney Morning Herald, in an editorial.  “We, too, are a rugged settler nation, and many of us in the Outback were devoted to our weapons.  But after a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur in 1996, we cracked-down on gun ownership, outlawing some weapons and mandating licensing and background checks.  Aussies eagerly turned in thousands of guns in our buyback program, and our risk of dying by gunfire quickly fell by more than half.”

“Yet the U.S. remains trapped in its madness,” said Le Monde (France) in an editorial.  “America is killing itself and the Republican Party is ideologically complicit.”  That’s because the GOP is attached to the U.S. gun lobby, and because the antiquated U.S. system of representation gives weight to Senators from less-populated Republican-led state legislations.  Because of this, the American people can’t vote their way out of their nightmare.  After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, most Americans wanted at least background checks for gun buyers.  But  the “elected officials’ representing only 118 million voters were able to defeat those chosen by 194 million voters.  U.S. schools will surely continue to be “transformed into bloody shooting ranges covered in blood.”

Will that be what is now called the, “American exceptionalism?”

Copyright G. Ater 2022