America’s Gun Violence Vortex

When is what seems like a major news story not as substantive as when you first think? The US mass shooting story would appear to qualify. Their frequency and the merry go round of inaction that follows is becoming so predictable that it barely qualifies as news. Thus, the latest shooting appears to have gone by this playbook and shown further evidence that the US is trapped in a gun violence vortex of its own making.

A school in Uvalde, Texas, soon before the holidays. Children full of hopes and dreams. A place of learning and safety. All suddenly shattered by the sounds of automatic gunfire and a shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. The killer had used an AR-15 style assault rifle. As Vice-President, Kamala Harris, explained "”it was designed for a specific purpose: to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war, with no place, no place in a civil society."

Yet firearms continue to have a central place in American society and its politics with no sign of any real change of direction regardless of the toll from these horrific events. The background statistics are well known but still incredulous for those who live in countries with tight gun controls. There are over 400 million guns owned by Americans, which breaks down as 120 firearms per 100 citizens.

Such a heavily armed population sees guns as a bigger killer than car accidents, claiming some 45,000 American lives in the last year. A US Justice Department funded study found, prior to the Uvalde attack, that of all the mass shootings that took place between 1966 and 2019, more than half took place since 2000, with 20% of them occurring between 2010 and 2019. In the last five years of the study period, an average of 51 people died from mass shootings per year, compared with only eight people in the 1970s.

Mass shootings are just the most high-profile consequence of having weapons of war proliferating in a country of peace. Their use in successful suicides, in situations of domestic violence and more controversially in how police use such weapons are the day-to-day story of a country where it is easier to get a gun than a driving license.

The statistics and the trends are clear, but so are the politics. The “gun lobby” are well funded, focused and feared. They can mobilise single issue voters at incredible effect despite national polling being disconnected from their liberal view of who should own what weapons. Macro attempts to do what countries like Australia have successfully done to reduce the number of guns in the public domain have barely been spoken about. Instead, political action has attempted to drill down on types of weapons or ammunition leading to little in the way of change.

The arguments against ‘gun control’ are legion and seem centralised on both a defence of fundamental American freedoms and the practical point that the only thing that can stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Gun sales spike following such mass shootings and Senator Ted Cruz made the argument that more children would die if you couldn’t buy assault weapons, explaining that “‘guns are used defensively to stop a crime between 500,000 and 1 million times every single year”.

The hardening of bipartisan politics in America has meant that policies that grapple the firearms issue are more distant than ever. Instead, the debate has moved quickly on to how the local police handled the incident. The fact that mistakes were made and that armed guards failed to defend the school effectively and that police delayed entry into the school have sucked up much of the oxygen around the incident, understandably so in replace of repeating failed debates of the past.

President Biden visited the site of the killing this week, it was his third visit to a mass shooting site since being elected. Whilst some commentators speculated that the horror of so many dead children could be a ‘tipping point’ around this issue in the US, the fact that soon after the Republican likely nominee for the next election, Donald Trump, made political hay from the issue shows how gridlocked it really remains.