PUT YOURSELF in the shoes of the men and women who have just lost their son, daughter, mother, father, spouse, or best friend to the bullets coming from these senseless mass shooting in America. As of August 5, which is just the 217th day of 2019, there have been 255 mass shootings in the United States, which means there is an average of more than one mass shooting a day.
A mass shooting, as defined by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), refers to “any incident in which at least four people were shot, excluding the shooter.”
Almost all of these mass shootings have one thing in common — the shooters use assault weapons that were made to be used by soldiers in war zones, not by civilians!
As CBS News reported, just in the past eight days, more than 100 people have been shot, including the most recent shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas with 22 people killed, and at least 24 wounded.
In less than 24 hours, nine people were killed and 27 were injured in a historic district of Dayton, Ohio.
According to the data tracked by the GVA, “there have been a total of 33,237 total shooting incidents, resulting in 8,796 gun deaths and 17,480 injuries in America in 2019 as of August 5 alone.
“These 2019 numbers could top the record of 2016, which recorded 382 mass shootings. The GVA reported that “the past two years came close, with 346 mass shootings in 2017 and 240 in 2018.”
Even before President Donald Trump was sworn in, the United States was already notorious for being obsessed with guns, more than any other country in the world.
According to a November 7, 2017 New York Times report, “no other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shooters than the United States.
According to a 2015 study by Prof. Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama, “Americans comprise 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns.”
The Times further reported that according to the study — from 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American.
The University of Alabama study found that worldwide, “a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience mass shooting,” and this relationship held when Prof. Lankford excluded the United States, which would reveal that mass shootings “could NOT be explained by some other factors particular to the United States. It remained true when he controlled for homicides, which would suggest “mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.”
We would think a progressive and information-driven rich industrialized nation like the United States would address this issue head-on, just like how other nations have acted decisively to put an end to this tragedy. But not in the United States, thanks but no thanks to the powerful lobbyist National Rifle Association (NRA).
The NRA has been heavily investing in lawmakers and the executive office by channeling most of their powerful dirty money to the election campaigns of members of the Republican Party and President Donald Trump. This is why no stricter gun control laws have been passed even despite the string of mass shootings in the United States, offering only “thoughts and prayers.”
The last time the U.S. federal government enacted a law to limit gun ownership was 25 years ago — the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It was written to be effective only for 10 years, the law banned the manufacture, sale and possession of some military-style assault weapons, including AR-15. However, the law reduced the number of mass shootings during the decade it was in effect, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery published in January 2019.
When that law expired in 2004, several attempts had been made to bring back the law. Following the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2013, President Barack Obama pushed to renew the ban, only to be blocked by the Republican-led Senate.
Obama initiated his own measure to ban the mentally ill from purchasing a gun following the San Bernardino shootings in 2015. This Obama-era regulation required the Social Security Administration to submit records of mentally disabled people to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the FBI database used to determine whether someone can buy a firearm under the 1993 Brady Bill.
As reported by USA Today, this rule would have applied to about 75,000 people who were “adjudicated as a mental defective” and who had applied for Social Security benefits, and had a mechanism to notify those affected so they could appeal.
HOWEVER, when Trump became president, this regulation was among the very first pieces of the Obama legacy that he overturned. On February 28, 2017, Trump killed this regulation that would have tightened gun background checks to help prevent the mentally ill from buying a gun.
When the Democrats won back the House, they passed a sweeping gun control legislation in February 2019. While there were a few Republicans who joined the House Democrats, the Republican-controlled Senate NEVER debated nor acted on this new legislation.
Now Trump blames violent video games, violent television programs, the media, and past administrations for the recent mass shootings. Reading from a teleprompter, Trump denounced hate, racism, violence, and would be visiting El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.
EL PASO said it would be better if Trump would not come because they blame the president for the tragedy, especially as the victims of the mass shooting were Hispanic, intentionally targeted by the killer.
Trump ran his presidential campaign on scare tactics and hateful rhetoric demonizing people of color, Muslims, undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. The policies he has pushed as president have just further escalated this attack — by blaming these people who quite do not look like the “white Americans” for the crimes, social and economic problems of the United States. Trump would call this an “invasion,” “infestation” of America by criminals, murderers and rapists.
In his rallies, he has encouraged chants among the audience shouting “send her back” about four duly elected congresswomen of color who are critical of him, even if three of them were born in the United States and one is a naturalized American who came in as a refugee.
In Florida, he was firing up his base on how to solve the problems with these undocumented immigrants and somebody in the audience shouted “shoot them”, and he LAUGHED and said, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that.”
THE FACT: The rise of violence in the United States has been perpetrated not by people of color nor Muslims after 9/11. These strings of violence have been committed by domestic terrorists— the white nationalists and supremacists who have been emboldened since Trump campaigned and got elected as president. Trump would not even accept this problem despite facts substantiated by hard data, whether here in the United States nor in other parts of the world.
ENOUGH OF THESE SENSELESS MASS SHOOTINGS! Fellow Americans, speak out and speak up and compel our leaders to ACT. Now!
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
