Yesterday the world woke up to the shocking news of the killing of at least 17 people in a Florida high school overnight.
In this instance, the gunman has been identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz who was expelled from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland for disciplinary problems. He surrendered and was taken into custody shortly after the shooting at the school.
This tragedy happened even as the memory of last October’s killing of over 50 people at a country music concert in Las Vegas is fresh in the minds of so many.
And who can forget the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre!
On December 14 that year, 20-year-old Adam Lanza gunned down 20 first-graders and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The deranged man began his attack by killing his mother at their home and ended it by turning his gun on himself.
Wednesday’s tragedy was the 18th school shooting incident in the US this year, according to gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety.
For decades now, firearms-related violence has been occurring in America with sickening regularity, and the country’s inexplicable obsession with guns has left the rest of the world baffled.
According to available statistics, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the gun-related murder rate in the United States is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the US had 82% of all gun deaths.
A New York Times report states that, according to a 2015 research conducted by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, “Americans make up about 4.4% of the global population but own 42% of the world’s guns”.
One is reminded of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s remarks in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. Speaking on WOR Radio he said: “I don’t think there’s any other developed country in the world that has remotely the problem we have.” “We have more guns than people in this country.”
And according to a 2012 report by StatsCan, Canada’s national statistical agency – the most recent year available – the US suffered a total of 8,813 murders involving the use of firearms that year. Whereas its northern neighbour, Canada, in the same year, recorded just 172 firearms-related homicides.The Americans’ obsession with guns has for long ranked the US the number one on the list of gun-owning nations. There are more guns in private hands than anywhere else on earth. On a guns-per-capita basis (90 guns per 100 residents) it has the odious distinction of being ahead of Yemen (61 per 100) which ranks second, according to the Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
America’s gun laws are so bizarre that they defy belief. “Membership in a terrorist organisation does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in 2010.
The right to bear arms in America is protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution. And the pro-gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), has time and again exploited this Statute provision to foil attempts by successive governments to tighten gun laws in the country.
As expected, reacting to the latest incident President Donald Trump has conveyed his “prayers and condolences to the families of victims of the terrible Florida shooting….” besides calling the gunman “mentally disturbed”.
While soothing words are fine, instead of sidestepping the real issue, it is high time President Trump and his administration decided to address the elephant in the room and bring in tougher gun laws, if for nothing else than to prevent more deaths of innocent students.