US powerless to stop gun violence
On the first day of October, something happened in the United States that’s happening more-and-more frequently — a mass shooting took place.
During the first 275 days of 2015, there have been 294 mass (four people or more) shootings that have resulted in the tragic deaths of 380 people.
The wanton murders of nine innocent people in Roseburg, Ore., set in motion an all-too-familiar and predictable set of actions.
At the outset, the 24-hour cable news stations always break away from their usual dissections of what the heck Donald Trump or Ben Carson just said, in order to go all in with wall-to-wall coverage from the scene of the carnage.
At first, there will always be misinformation. (The shooter supposedly didn’t have any connection to the college in Roseburg. We’ll discover he’d been a student there.)
Next comes news conferences with cops who’ll hedge on any specific information.
You can expect there to be daylong, and even nightlong panel discussions about who the gunman was, and why he did what he did.
By the following day President Obama will appear with an angry statement about how these kinds of things are happening way too much.
On Oct. 2, though, Obama seemed much angrier than he’d been during the previous 14 times he’d held news conferences about mass butchery.
“We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?” Obama asked.
He admonished the news media to compare the number of gun-related deaths in the United States during the past 10 years, to the number of people who’ve died because of acts of domestic terrorism.
The non-partisan fact-checker, Politifact.com, revealed that a total of 301,797 people have died from an assortment of firearm related deaths, compared to only 71 people who have died because of domestic terrorism.
Those statistics are astounding. But there will always be gun advocates in and out of Congress, who believe there is a need for even more guns in the hands of Americans.
So, anytime a mad gunman walks into a crowd of innocent people, no matter the circumstance, the same script is followed.
The police, the news media and their assembled experts, the president and gun rights activists follow the same script, without any answers to the critical question – why is the United States of America such a violent place, with no real answers about how to stop it?
That’s the heart of this.
Sure, we have violent movies and video games. But countries all over the planet have those, without a fraction of the gun deaths this nation has.
But here is what makes the United States different from other countries.
Did you know that there are only three countries out of 193 countries in the world that have a constitutional right to bear arms?
And of those three (Guatemala and Mexico are the other two), the United States is the only country on earth, that doesn’t have restrictions on the right to own a gun.
The Founding Fathers, as wise as we’ve been led to assume they were, unwisely left out any condition in which the government could regulate the ownership of guns or ammunition.
In other words, this country’s gun culture is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our existence, that any discussion that would even lead to thoughtful curbs on gun ownership will automatically lead to calls that “they’re trying to take our guns away.”
And worse, when those discussions arise, there will always be marked increases in gun sales.
So we’re trapped into a never-ending spiral of events, followed by words, followed by inaction.
That’s not necessarily “American Exceptionalism.”
Unless, of course, you consider that it is “exceptional” that a country that leads in so many areas, is alone in being powerless when it comes to solving an ever-growing problem.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and a 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net