Towards the end of last month, a gunman in the US state of Maine killed 18 people and wounded scores of others. Last year, there was a total of 649 mass shootings. This is shooting in which at least four people are killed.
If this trajectory continues, the number of dead and wounded from mass shootings this year will hit a new gruesome milestone. Mass shootings, though particularly horrific in their barbarism, make up just a fraction of those killed through gun violence in the US every year. This year alone, the total number of those killed by gun violence – suicides and homicides – is a staggering 35, 000 people.
To put that figure in perspective, consider that in the Vietnam conflict which lasted eight years, America lost 58,000 soldiers. In just one year, therefore, gun violence has claimed more than half of those killed in that terrible conflict.
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Also, that figure – 35,000 – by far surpasses the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. So in any given two-year period, the number of people killed by gun violence in the US easily surpasses the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Simply put, there is a raging civil war in America.
Would the American public tolerate a war in which scores of soldiers are killed in an ambush every month? Would Americans accept a war in which 35,000 soldiers are lost every year? They would find this cost in lives to be too high to bear.
And yet, month after month, Americans passively congregate to mourn victims of mass shootings. Every day, they countenance tens of gun homicides.
They have resigned themselves to this daily harvest of death in their neighbourhoods and towns. They seem to have accepted that murder by the gun is “as American as apple pie”. There are some Americans who call for tougher gun laws. But they are a whimper in the wilderness against powerful gun lobbies, robotic institutions that have become unresponsive to new challenges, and a culture that refuses to reinvent itself to embrace new realities.
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The gun lobbies, and judicial and legislative institutions are loathe to infringe on the constitutional right to bear arms. Even common sense proposals such as mandatory background checks of gun buyers or banning automatic weapons are met with rabid sophistry. The fact that countries with strict gun control laws have very low murder rates does not penetrate the fundamentalist thinking of those with influence and power.
The Second Amendment that enshrined the right to bear arms addressed concerns in an age when individual responsibility was an honoured value. Today in America, a “grievance culture” has taken root. If you are sacked, society is to blame, not your negligence. If your wife leaves you, you are the victim, no matter your adultery. If you fail an exams, the teachers are to blame. You feel justified to avenge the “injustices” committed against you. Sick culture!
Source: The East African
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