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mass shootings
To Save Children’s Lives, Harris Should Campaign on an Assault Weapons Ban
The shooter in Apalachee High School had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
Sep 07, 2024
School shootings are recurring markers of a societal sickness, an unshakeable acceptance of violence and senseless death. The murder of two 14-year-old students and two teachers on Wednesday, and the wounding of nine others, at a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, is the latest in this seemingly permanent contagion.
Ninth-grader Colt Gray, 14, had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations and modular accessories flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
We know that the accused lived in a home with guns, thanks to a statement from the FBI issued on Wednesday, that read in part:
In May 2023, the FBI… received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns.
Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject… there was no probable cause to take any additional law enforcement action.
Authorities had advance warning over a year earlier. Apalachee High School then reportedly received a telephoned threat on the morning of the shooting, warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee.
The so-called “AR platform” has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. At the Uvalde mass school shooting in Texas on May 24, 2022, the teenaged shooter killed 21 people, injured 21 more, and held 400 law enforcement personnel at bay, while he killed children one by one for over an hour. It was the lethality of the AR rifle that kept those hundreds of heavily armed agents too frightened to intervene.
As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, made a renewal of the assault weapons ban a central part of her campaign. She called for the same as recently as December, 2023, while still just the running mate for President Joe Biden.
But now, amid a tight general election race against former President Donald Trump, Harris is being more measured. As news broke of the Apalachee shooting, Harris was taking the stage at a rally in New Hampshire.
“Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families, of course, and we are grateful to the first responders and the law enforcement that were on the scene. But this is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies,” she said. “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country, once and for all… it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Kris Brown is the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after James Brady, the former press secretary for former President Ronald Reagan. Brady was shot in the head during the attempted assassination of Reagan. Brady survived, and went on with his wife Sarah to campaign for gun control.
“Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that that assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period,” Kris Brown said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the Apalachee shooting.
Brown is optimistic that positive change is possible, despite the entrenched power of the gun lobby.
“There is a growing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country,” she said, “including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority.”
These weapons of war, marketed to U.S. consumers as benign “modern sporting rifles,” need to be banned.
Assault weapons bans can work. A 1996 mass shooting in Australia left 35 dead and 23 injured. Almost immediately, that nation of gun lovers passed an assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback law. There hasn’t been a shooting anywhere near that scale there since.
Success won’t be so swift here in the U.S., a nation awash with hundreds of millions of guns. Still, the Harris-Walz campaign should make an assault weapons ban a central demand and take it to the voters in November. The lives of our nation’s children depend on it.
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US Media Weeps for Georgia School Shooting Victims, But Not Those Massacred in Gaza
The carnage and suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli military is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Sep 05, 2024
The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for hours on end Wednesday after a 14-year-old shooter killed four people and wounded nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Two of the dead were also 14-year-olds, destined never to grow older. The other two fatalities were teachers. As a teacher, I take their deaths personally. The teen shooter had spoken about killing people last year, but since Georgia does not have a red flag law, guns were not removed from his house. The deaths of the teens, and the wounding of eight other students, along with a teacher, underscore the horror of these mass shootings, their little lives cut unforgivably short, their parents’ lives blighted in ways that give nightmares to all parents of a child. Regular mass shootings are not permitted in actually civilized countries, whether Europe or Japan. They are as much an American peculiar institution as our form of plantation slavery was, and they are just as rooted in a valuing of property over humanity (in the case of slavery it involved turning humanity into property).
By the magic of empathy and identification, the news hits us in the gut when we hear of these strangers torn to pieces by hot bullets. They are also Americans. It shouldn’t matter, but the vigil-keepers and interviewees are blonde and white. They are like the majority of Americans.
Those who mouth “thoughts and prayers” and who clearly do not feel the deaths viscerally perhaps lack that empathy. Perhaps they are sociopaths, who cannot empathize with others. Some of the unsympathetic, though, distance themselves from the rawness of these murders by seeing them as a cost of living in a “free” society, by which they mean a society that has few effective regulations about the ownership and use of guns. They see the mass shootings the way many people see automobile deaths, as “accidents,” as a feature of life that they believe unavoidable. Many automobile deaths, too, however, are avoidable, and they are collisions, not accidents. Some 25% of them are from drunk driving, which is a conscious choice and not an accident at all. The most common cause of collisions is distracted driving, which also results from choices people make, and it is a problem that is getting worse. As for guns, it is odd that so intentional an act as premeditated murder should be classed as a natural disaster by so many Americans.
Sociologists use the notion of framing to understand the stories people tell themselves about events. Gun safety advocates see responsible gun ownership as requiring laws and regulations that protect owners and others. Those men who are insouciant about mass shootings think requiring gun safety detracts from their individual freedom (and possibly from their manhood, which frankly speaks poorly of them).
Although the cable news channels went into hyperdrive covering the sickening events in Georgie, they ignored other killings of children on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Israeli bombardments killed 42 Palestinian victims in massacres of three families. The Gaza Ministry of Health said, “Many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them.”
Judging by past such bombardments, a majority of the victims, over 20 people, were children and women. The Israeli military allows an astonishing, and sickening, 20 civilian deaths for each militant of the Qassam Brigades that it kills with drones and rockets. No civilized military behaves in this way. It is creepy. U.S. officers would be rightly court-martialed for implementing such lax and inhumane rules of engagement. Officers have told me that the Geneva Conventions are their “Bible.” They are deeply angered when it is suggested that the Israeli military is behaving no worse than the American does.
The 22 or more women and children killed and the dozens of others injured or trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza did not receive even 15 seconds of air time on America’s multi-billion-dollar “news” screens on Wednesday.
I don’t understand why. Is it that they are not coded as “white?” But if you met many of them, you couldn’t tell them by skin color from many “white” Americans, including Italian-Americans. Is it because they aren’t Americans? But opinion polling shows tremendous U.S. empathy with Ukrainian victims of Russian bombardment.
For some, indifference is achieved by framing. “People die in war,” said President Joe Biden. Some people take seriously ridiculous Israeli army allegations of having killed 13,000 Hamas fighters, which makes the total dead of nearly 41,000 (though this is a vast underestimate) seem like par for the course. In fact, the Israeli military counts any young able-bodied male as a militant. And since they kill so many people from the air, the Israelis don’t really know whom they killed in many instances. The U.S. used to do that in Vietnam when it engaged in body counts. One of my late friends, a Green Beret, complained to me bitterly about such body counts or “kiting.” “If it was dead and it was Vietnamese, it was Viet Cong,” he said bitterly.
So the murdered children of Gaza (the Israeli military ROE amounts to mass murder in International Humanitarian Law) are put off stage. They aren’t configured as “news” as U.S. mass media conceive it. The carnage and suffering is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Boutique outlets like Middle East Eye, helmed by veteran Middle East correspondent David Hearst, show us the reality, which is not easier to take than the deaths in Winder, Georgia — that is, if we haven’t erected frames that prevent us from seeing and feeling it:
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What the US Can Learn From Other Nations About Tackling Our Gun Violence Crisis
With under 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns, as well as a comparatively higher number of gun deaths per 100,000 people than peer countries.
Aug 18, 2024
For most of us a “near miss”—whether a car wreck or a marriage breakup—calls on us to ask, “Why” and to seek answers. So, certainly the near assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump calls for similar digging into root causes we can address.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that crime is a big, national problem, and no doubt this near tragedy reinforces our worry. But what many of us may not grasp is how much more serious our crime challenge is relative to nations we assume to be our peers. In assassinations alone, we are one of just three countries sharing top place for the number of presidents killed between 1875 and 2004.
The U.S. by far leads the world in gun ownership per capita, with a rate of 121 guns per 100 people. With under 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Among our peer countries, Canada is second with 35 guns per 100 people, or roughly one-third our rate. But note this big difference: Canada suffers just over two gun-related deaths per 100,000 while our rate is 11 deaths. Closely following Canada in number of guns owned are Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. All have fewer than three gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. That’s almost a quarter of our rate.
Since the solution to gun violence goes well beyond addressing mental health, let’s begin with the most basic gun reforms advocated by the Democratic Party: strengthening background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of those with a history of violent crime.
Our country is also plagued by mass shootings—defined as the killing or injuring of four or more. By this measure, in 2023 America experienced almost two a day—totaling more than 650 such shootings.
Among the young in America—those 1 to 17—more now die from firearms than by any other type of injury or illness; and this death rate doubled in just eight years, from 2013 to 2021. And Black, Latino, and Indigenous people in the U.S. are more than 10 times, more than two times, and nearly 3.5 times (respectively) to die of homicide by firearms compared with whites.
So, what are possible solutions?
We can start by seeking lessons from our peer countries.
In Canada stricter gun control includes a ban on civilian ownership of automatic weapons. Handguns require a permit that is issued only on a temporary basis, and only for gun-club members and gun collectors and anyone demonstrating a need for self-defense purposes. Magazine capacity is limited to 10 rounds. Purchase of rifles and shotguns requires an official certificate and involves a 28-day waiting period. Purchase is denied to people with certain criminal histories or who have mental-health disorders associated with violence. Canada also has “red flag” laws, where an emergency prohibition can be issued for anyone judged to be a danger to themselves or others.
In Finland, gun ownership requires a license and registration, an aptitude test for the license, and a minimum age of 20. Guns can only be carried for a specific purpose, and gun owners bear the responsibility for ensuring that the gun and ammunition don’t end up in the wrong hands.
In Norway, semiautomatic weapons are banned, a license is required by the police, as well as a “valid” reason for obtaining it—such as membership in a gun club or use for hunting. Self-defense isn’t considered a valid reason. An applicant also must pass an exam after extensive firearm training, and firearms must be securely stored in an approved safe. With a 48-hour notice, police are allowed to enter to inspect the safe.
In the U.S., domestic abusers can now be barred from owning a firearm, as well as felons, fugitives, drug users, those involuntarily hospitalized for mental health, and those dishonorably discharged from the military. Youth under 18 cannot possess a handgun, but they can still own a rifle or shotgun in the majority of states. Prohibited firearms include those with serial numbers erased, machine guns produced after 1986, short-barreled shotguns or rifles, and silencers. Federal law doesn’t require licenses or permits to own firearms, but 10 states do require them, dependent on completing background checks.
Note that federal law now requires background checksonly on purchases from a federally licensed gun dealer. So, more background checks could help.
The problem? Only 40% of gun sales in the U.S. are through such a federally licensed dealer.
Note that the 17 states that now do require prior universal background checks also require all sales of firearms to go through a licensed dealer who can perform such checks prior to sale.
Additional protection could come from expanding bans on the most dangerous weapons. For example, approximately two-thirds of U.S. states allow civilian ownership of machine guns.
Note that, overall, gun laws vary widely by state—with California being the strongest with a score of 89.5 out of 100 while most southern states receive a score of 20 and below.
Might gun violence ultimately be a mental health problem, as Republicans like to claim? It’s true that Finland and Norway, among the happiest nations, have a low rate of gun violence. On the other hand, Canada—ranking lower than the U.S. in mental health—has much lower rates of gun-related deaths despite having among the world’s highest rates of gun ownership. Of course when it comes to suicide, the link between mental health and gun violence is undeniable. As evidence, Greenland has a high suicide rate and gun-related deaths (18 deaths per 100,000 people) despite its low gun-ownership rate.
And if poor mental health is one root of the problem, all the more reason to pass laws requiring tougher mental health screenings for gun ownership. Currently, a person can be barred if declared mentally incompetent by a court or government body. And if Republicans truly believe gun violence is a mental health problem, they need to actually vote for government support for mental health initiatives rather than defunding them.
Plus, if better mental health is foundational to reducing gun violence, all of us should also be backing policies to alleviate stress created by low wages and high-housing costs, for example—precisely the changes that Republicans resist.
Since the solution to gun violence goes well beyond addressing mental health, let’s begin with the most basic gun reforms advocated by the Democratic Party: strengthening background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of those with a history of violent crime or posing a danger to themselves or others, such as domestic abusers.
Our upcoming national election offers a great opportunity to highlight these crucial steps for public safety, as the Democratic candidate for vice-president—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—became a gun-control advocate in response to the 2018 Parkland high-school shooting.
Commonsense gun reforms are the least we can do as a nation to protect ourselves—especially children in schools, the minority members of our population, and our own politicians—while still protecting our right to bear arms.
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