Mass shootings now average nearly two a week. They continue to happen faster than most people can keep track of how many times an anguished public cried out “Never again!” only to have it happen again and again and again.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the slaughter of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Next Feb. 14 marks five years since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 14 students and three educators dead and 17 students wounded.
Next April is the 24th anniversary of the 13 murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the first of the “never again” school shootings.
Next May marks the first anniversary of the slaughter of 19 children and two adults at Uvalde, Texas, as they looked forward to summer vacation.
Almost unnoticed, the U.S. passed a hideous milestone last year. For the first time, more children died from gunfire than from car accidents, with 3,597 lives lost. Black children were eight times more likely to be victims as whites.
Everyday, everywhere
Among all ages, firearms took 45,222 American lives in 2020, according to the CDC’s most recent count, including suicides and accidents as well as murders of all kinds. Mass shootings with four or more victims did not account for most of them. Gun violence is an everyday problem everywhere.
We focus this opinion essay on children because it is so singularly grotesque that we seem to care so little as a nation for those dearest to us, our hope for the future, and our most important and precious national resource. Crimes against children are particularly horrific — or so we like to think.
If we love them as we all say we do, they should be spared that perpetual fear. There should be no need to terrify them with the active shooter drills that all but eight states compel their schools to conduct.
Those traumatic exercises are a pretense that politicians are dealing with the root of the problem. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, founded after the Newtown tragedy, “almost no research” affirms that the drills prevent school shootings or protect people when they occur.
The problem is too many guns everywhere. Kept at home in unsafe storage, they are much too accessible for accidents and suicides as well as for settling grudges.
Comparing America to the United Kingdom and nine other advanced nations, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that with 46% of the child population, the U.S. was responsible for 97% of all child gun deaths.
A lethal obsession
That’s the consequence of America’s lethal gun obsession. With only 4.4% of the world’s population, The New York Times reported last month, we own 42% of the guns.
We lead the world in another grotesque respect, as the only nation with more guns than civilians — with some 400 million weapons.
Nearly 1 in every 3 mass shootings worldwide is by an American, according to the study The Times reported. The study’s author, Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama, said that the sheer number of guns is the only variable that sets the U.S. apart from comparable nations where mass shootings are rare.
After every mass shooting, politicians invariably call for better mental health, which is surely warranted. But Lankford’s study found that our spending, our proportion of mental health professionals and our rates of mental illness are essentially the same as in nations without rampant gun violence.
In retirement, Chief Justice Warren Burger denounced the gun lobby’s notion of an individual right to carry as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, that I have seen in my lifetime.” He noted that the Second Amendment was worded to guarantee the existence of a self-armed militia, at a time when no standing army existed.
Today’s court has lost its way. In the bizarre view of Clarence Thomas and five other justices, government can impose no restrictions unlike those that were commonplace when the Bill of Rights was adopted.
Thomas’ opinion last June in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen trashed a New York City ordinance requiring a special reason to carry a handgun. As a consequence, lower courts are indulging in such idiocies as overthrowing state laws against sales of assault weapons to people under 21 along with a federal law requiring serial numbers on weapons. A greater gift to criminal cartels could not be imagined.
Children in America won’t be safe until we, as a nation, decide that we love them more than we love our guns.
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