There are concrete solutions to this dire situation.
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
So far this year, at least 213 mass shootings have bloodied schools, sidewalks, grocery stores and other places thought to be safe in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Those are shootings that have resulted in at least four victims killed or injured. |
That's in the first 144 days of 2022. |
Not all of them have been on the horrific scale of the massacres in Uvalde, Texas, or in Buffalo, N.Y., which together have left at least 31 people dead, 19 of them children. But the deaths and scar tissue add up. More than 240 people have died in mass shootings. And many more have been wounded. |
We have been here before. We will be here again. The question is: Will this latest blood bath, with its staggering toll, the second most deadly school shooting in U.S. history, change anything? |
In two guest essays this week, Mary McCord and Nicholas Kristof offer possible approaches to reframe what has become a stale debate over "gun control" that appears to have done little or nothing to change the trajectory of gun violence. As a somber President Biden asked Tuesday night, "Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?" |
McCord, a former top national security official in the Justice Department, frames the issue as one of national security. In her piece, she writes that the United States must begin to look at the easy access to firearms — especially semiautomatic weapons — as a threat to national security, from terrorists foreign and domestic. |
"Foreign terrorist organizations," she points, "have long urged their followers to take advantage of lax U.S. gun laws to plan attacks in the United States." |
Domestic terrorists already know this. Police say that the 18-year-old who stormed a supermarket in Buffalo in search of Black victims was clad in body armor and armed with a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, modified to hold high-capacity magazines. |
If teenagers can't buy beer at 18, he asks, why should they be able to purchase an assault weapon? And since we usually don't allow people with felony convictions to possess firearms, perhaps, he suggests, people with misdemeanor convictions for drug or alcohol abuse, violence or stalking should be barred from buying firearms as well. |
He has more suggestions, and while acknowledging they won't make everyone safe, he says that "experts suggest that over time we plausibly could reduce gun deaths by a third." |
That's 15,000 lives saved annually. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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