In the United States, 20 million assault rifles are in private hands, and nearly 400 million guns of all sorts. In the first 190 days of this year, Americans have suffered 320 mass shootings, more than one a day. Highland Park, Illinois, Uvalde, Texas, Chattanooga, Tennessee – the list is endless. Sixty-two people were shot and 10 killed in Chicago on the same holiday weekend that the Highland Park massacre took place, without garnering nearly as much attention.
Assault weapons are weapons of war, designed to kill opposing troops in large numbers by allowing a fusillade of bullets to be fired by one gun. They are useless in hunting deer. They create chaos on our streets, enabling the criminal or the insane to outgun the police.
America suffers over 45,000 deaths by shooting a year. Japan – recently stunned when a former prime minister was shot – experiences fewer than 10 gun deaths a year. Seventy-nine percent of homicides in America involve a gun; 4 percent in the UK. No advanced industrial country abides with the mass private ownership of guns that America has, much less the private ownership of assault weapons. In Japan, there are 377,000 firearms in private hands (about 0.3 per 100 people). In the U.S., there are 393 million, about 120 for every 100 people. No other advanced country suffers the number of casualties that America experiences from mass shootings. The two are not unconnected.
Republicans have turned sensible gun control into a partisan issue. They stand for guns – and against any meaningful restrictions. They brandish assault weapons in their political ads. Recently, Texas Republican Party activists booed its Republican senator, John Cronyn, for supporting symbolic gun reform legislation in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers. Republicans passed a platform that opposed legislation that would merely lower the minimum age to buy assault weapons from 18 to 21, arguing that Texans under 21 are “most likely to be victims of violent crime and thus most likely to need to defend themselves.” These “law and order” Republicans believe that vigilantes armed with assault weapons, not police, provide protection.
Law does make a difference. Australia, like the U.S., was originally a settler colony, with a wild west and cowboys who prided themselves on their self-reliance. In 1996 to 1997, after a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, that killed 35, a center-right coalition government in Sydney passed and enforced the National Firearms Agreement. It strictly restricted gun ownership, required registration of all guns in private hands, a permit for new firearm purchases, and a ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles. It also established a mandatory buyback program for designated weapons, collecting and destroying 650,000 guns – an estimated 20 percent of all firearms in private hands.
The laws made a difference. By 2011, suicides were down by more than one-half, and homicides by 42 percent. An in-depth study by the Rand Corporation in 2021 noted that these were declining before the law was passed so not all the decline can be attributed to the law. Rand did conclude, however, that “the strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings, and female homicide victimization.”
If assault weapons are less readily available, mass shootings will be less frequent. A 2018 study found that in the 18 years before Port Arthur, Australia, experienced 13 mass shootings — defined as incidents in which five or more people died. In the years since, the country suffered one such incident.
At present, as the mass shootings in affluent Highland Park, Illinois, demonstrate, Americans everywhere are at risk. It does not have to be this way. Sensible gun laws – starting with a ban on assault weapons – will dramatically reduce the terror, the deaths and the traumatic horror of those who survive.
Second Amendment zealots believe that the Constitution protects the right to own a gun. Ironically, that was not recognized by the courts in the first 200-plus years of the republic. The Second Amendment protected the right of gun ownership for state militia. The right to own a gun separately from the militia was invented virtually whole cloth by the gang of five conservative justices in the Heller decision in 2008 in an opinion written by Antonin Scalia.
The decision overturned a DC law banning the private ownership of handguns in the home. Even the conservative judges in Heller recognized the right of the state to regulate the use, ownership and sale of guns. Only this year – again in a decision utterly divorced from the text of the Constitution or the history of gun regulations, did the right-wing majority – now a gang of six – overturn a 100-year-old New York state statute limiting the carrying of guns in public.
But the activist right-wing judges now driving the Supreme Court are not the biggest obstacle to sensible gun control, the inactive and dysfunctional Congress is. Surely it is long past time to remove those who are standing in the way and force the Congress to act to protect the security and general welfare of its citizens.
You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.
©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
