Fourteen dead and 17 wounded in San Bernardino, California. And that follows just five days after the attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in which three people died and nine were wounded. A month earlier, nine people were slain at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. In August, eight people were shot dead in a house outside Houston. In June, nine people were gunned down at a prayer meeting in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. In May, nine people were killed in a shootout among police and bikers in Waco, Texas. And on it goes.
President Barack Obama said after the Planned Parenthood attack that “this is not normal.” But sadly it is becoming altogether too normal in the US. On Wednesday the president added that the US has a pattern of mass shootings “that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.”
It will be days, most likely, before sufficient details and context are known to understand the atrocious act of violence that occurred on Wednesday at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. But it is not too soon to say that the common element in the vast majority of these mass killings - and in the daily parade of violence across the country - is the easy access to firearms. From 1998 to 2013, an average of 11,500 homicides each year were committed with guns in the US, according to data compiled by GunPolicy.org. For the last few years, there have been more guns than people in the US, by several counts.
When these mass murders occur, the instinct is to take a deep dive into the details to learn as much as is possible about who did what and why. That’s important to the investigation of the specific incident, obviously, but it misses the bigger picture, which is that such attacks have become so routine they have almost lost their ability to shock.
Enough. America’s infatuation with guns is suicidal. There are too many guns, too easily obtained. Often they are in the hands of those who should not have them at all, such as the mentally ill.
It’s absurd that one of the richest, freest, and most advanced societies in world history endures such a scourge with such equanimity. But there is hope. A Gallup poll in October found that 55% of Americans support stronger gun control measures, and other surveys have found that even a majority of NRA members support mandatory background checks - something the NRA itself has assiduously opposed. There is broad political support for stronger laws to address the nation’s gun addiction, but gun control advocates have so far been unable to counter the money and organisational heft of the NRA. It’s obscene that a single interest group is able to endanger an entire nation’s safety.
This crisis in American society must be fought through the ballot box, and through lobbying to loosen the iron grip the NRA holds on Congress and many state legislatures. That is where the pushback against this culture of death needs to occur. And it needs to occur now.
