The following is an excellent short summary from The Guardian of the catastrophic and virtually unique toll of gun possession and misuse in the United States.
This week’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was one of more than 3,500 mass shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago. It was America’s 215th in 2022 alone. It came as the nation still reeled from another massacre, this one targeting Black Americans, in Buffalo, New York, just a week prior.
The horror of 21 people, including 19 small children, being killed in their classroom is hard to grasp, but for one former firearms executive, it’s not a surprise. Ryan Busse, who spent his career in the industry and now advocates for gun control, published a powerful op-ed in the Guardian arguing that contrary to a familiar refrain, America is not broken – it’s working as intended.
“The truth is that Americans now live within an escalating system of radicalized gun tragedy that is working exactly as expected,” Busse writes. He argues that the profit motives of the industry, along with the extremist rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, has fueled a warped incentive structure that rewards “conspiracy-mongering, racism and fear campaigns” while spitting out voices like his that call for responsible policies. Whatever it takes to sell more guns.
Republicans remain in thrall to the NRA and call for more weapons after mass shootings – even though the presence of armed police didn’t stop the Uvalde shooter – and typically block even the mildest gun control measures. In an explainer we just published, the Guardian’s Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon visualize the debate around gun control in the last decade – how it intensifies in the aftermath of the mass shootings that penetrate the national conversation, and quickly recedes after efforts at legislation die in the Senate.
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As a global organization, we pay attention to the pulse in other countries, and I found this roundup of what international publications wrote about Uvalde incredibly insightful for the mirror it holds up to a uniquely American tragedy.
“If there is still an American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate its schools being regularly transformed into shooting ranges, sticky with blood,” reads an editorial in LeMonde. “America is killing itself, and the Republican party is looking elsewhere.” El Pais notes that the US has 4% of the world’s population, but almost half its pistols and rifles. “It’s a recurring drama, to which America’s lawmakers seem unwilling to put an end – even though they could.”
But no matter how ritualized mass killing in America is, and no matter how hopeless efforts at reform seem, we are not desensitized. We will continue to report relentlessly on the communities most impacted by gun violence, and not only after a mass shooting, through our long-running Guns and lies series. We’ll explore why places like Canada that also have relatively high rates of gun ownership don’t see these kinds of tragedies, and how parents in the US talk to their children about them. And we’ll track fresh efforts at reform even when they feel doomed. Politics are never static, and we won’t stop imagining a different future.