This is how several countries have managed to mitigate violence with weapons 1:25
(CNN) --
It's not that the United States can't stop its bloody string of mass murder.
It is that it lacks the national cohesion and the common will to do so.
The Texas elementary school massacre underscored that the world's most powerful country cannot even guarantee that its most vulnerable citizens, young children, are safe from violent death at their desks.
It would be difficult to find a more impressive government failure.
A deep political and cultural rift over guns, caused primarily by the right-wing blocking of efforts by Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass even modest safety measures, is boiling over again over the Texas shooting.
Mass murder is a sickeningly familiar background noise to everyday life in America, but the latest school bloodbath, in which 19 children and two teachers died, was an especially devastating blow.
The shooting reignited the sense of dread that millions of American parents feel when they say goodbye to their children at school.
And it will further mark a generation of students haunted by the perpetual fear of a school shooting, a terrifying sight for young minds only eased by virtual learning from the covid-19 pandemic, which has traumatized many of them. in other ways.
The carnage in Uvalde, Texas, was so horrific that even the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose nation has suffered appalling atrocities and war crimes since Russia's invasion, felt compelled to express his shock and condolences.
advertising
At a time of national angst, America's fractured politics is unsurprisingly falling short, failing to overcome the curses of personal political ambition and gridlock.
ANALYSIS |
Gun control laws are stalled in the US Congress and that won't change anytime soon.
School shooting survivor relives her experience 4:24
After the mass shootings in the country, family and futile rituals are developed, "thoughts and prayers" are sent for the victims;
meanwhile Democrats are calling for more gun safety measures and Republicans are denying that such killings are inevitable in a society awash in deadly firearms.
But the bloodshed, perpetrated by an 18-year-old who legally purchased semi-automatic rifles in a state that deemed that same armed youth too immature to buy a beer, is exposing the political paralysis over an end to mass murder as Never before.
People were shocked after an eerily similar 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, why not even the killings of 6- and 7-year-olds in class could lead to gun reform.
Schools, scene of gun violence in the United States: these have been the worst shootings, from Columbine and Sandy Hook to Uvalde
No one would make such a comment now.
A blood-soaked decade has made the country's politics more savage and divisive and even less capable of potentially life-saving compromises.
Conservative power and Senate filibuster have stalled multiple attempts to reform gun laws, which surely would have saved some lives, despite the recent Democratic monopoly over elected institutions in Washington.
Regular shootings, like the massacre at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 or the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, have sparked outrage and calls for change, but failed to break the policy inertia of Washington.
In fact, the momentum seems to be going in the opposite direction.
The right-wing ascendancy on the issue could be further underscored if the conservative-majority Supreme Court further loosens gun laws in a pending landmark Second Amendment case.
Texas political standoff illustrates national divide
President Joe Biden returned Tuesday night from an Asia trip that began after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and ended when news of the Texas carnage reached Air Force One. "Why do we keep leaving for this to happen?" he asked.
The answer to his cry of anguish was borne out in an emotional showdown in Texas on Wednesday between Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
O'Rourke stood up and interrupted a news conference being given by Abbott and other Texas officials and elected leaders called in to provide an update on the shooting.
"This is up to you, until you decide to do something different," O'Rourke told the governor, who has dismantled the state's gun laws and whom O'Rourke will try to beat in the November election.
O'Rourke launches proposals to prevent massacres in the US 0:42
Abbott, meanwhile, deflected from his own state's record of mass shootings by resorting to a well-known conservative and racially-tinged attack on Chicago, saying its history of gun violence showed strict gun laws don't work.
(Chicago officials responded by blaming imported guns from states with lax gun laws.)
The exchange revealed the yawning gap between Republicans and Democrats on guns, which has made even minor proposed legislative deals favored by the public — like expanding background checks — impossible.
O'Rourke's actions could have been viewed as a stunt by Republican officials.
Uvalde Republican Mayor Don McLaughlin, for example, called him a "sick son of a bitch."
But they reflect Democratic desperation over the party's failure to enact gun safety measures through legislative means, due to the GOP's obstruction of Congress and the unwillingness of some in their own party to change Senate rules. .
Republican leaders like Abbott have yet to face the politically unpalatable possibility that loosening gun laws for political gain with their base could make such massacres more likely.
The Texas school shooting has underscored, once again, how the first reaction among conservatives to mass murder is to call for more guns: armed guards in schools, for example, or even for teachers to carry guns.
What is the Second Amendment of the US Constitution and why does it create debate on the use of weapons?
What is the NRA and why is it so powerful in the US?
2:49
The GOP has spent years in the thrall of the gun lobby and political candidates like former President Donald Trump, who falsely warn rank-and-file voters that any form of limited legislative reform will see their guns seized.
No major Republican leader has ever tried to lay the groundwork for compromise.
The Second Amendment has been used by politicians like Trump as a tool in the larger narrative that alleges that racially diverse, liberal, coastal elites want to remove traditional life and culture from the hearts of white Americans.
The result is that there is no future for any Republican who challenges that orthodoxy.
Part of the tragedy here is that the vast majority of gun owners in America obey the law and only a tiny fraction are involved in shootings.
Many see owning a gun as a fundamental rite of passage.
And the country's quintessential individualistic streak means there is less focus on the collective good, as there might be in a developed European society, for example.
But there is little discussion in the Republican Party about what happens when the expansive exercise of such rights conflicts with the fundamental inalienable rights of others.
For example, what is more important: a gun owner's desire to purchase a high-powered weapon that would be appropriate for a battlefield, or a 6-year-old student's right to stay alive and go to fear free school
1 of 15
|
An 18-year-old man opened fire Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing at least 19 students and two adults, authorities said.
In the image, Kladys Castellón prays during a vigil that took place in Uvalde on Tuesday night.
Billy Calzada/AP |
WATCH THE GALLERY ➡️
2 of 15
|
People pray Tuesday night at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Uvalde.
William Luther/AP
3 of 15
|
People take comfort outside the Civic Center in Uvalde.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
4 of 15
|
Police personnel run near the scene of the shooting.
US Customs and Border Protection, which is the largest law enforcement agency in the area, helped with the response to the incident.
Marco Bello/Reuters
5 of 15
|
A Texas State Trooper walks outside Robb Elementary School, where the shooting occurred.
Eric Thayer/Bloomberg/Getty Images
6 of 15
|
A woman reacts outside the Uvalde Civic Center.
Marco Bello/Reuters
7 of 15
|
A minor boards a school bus Tuesday under police surveillance.
Robb High School had 535 students in the 2020-21 school year, according to state data.
About 90% of the students are Hispanic and about 81% are economically disadvantaged, the data shows.
Thursday was going to be the last day of school before summer break.
Marco Bello/Reuters
8 of 15
|
People react outside the Civic Center.
With this, they add at least 30 shootings in primary and secondary schools in 2022. Marco Bello/Reuters
9 of 15
|
Police officers and other first responders gather outside the school after Tuesday's shooting.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
10 of 15
|
A woman cries and hugs a minor while she talks on the phone outside the Uvalde Civic Center.
Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty Images
11 of 15
|
A woman cries as she leaves the Civic Center.
William Luther/San Antonio Express-News/Zuma
12 of 15
|
Law enforcement officers stand outside the school after the shooting.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have been assisting local law enforcement with the investigation.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
13 of 15
|
People sit on the sidewalk outside the school as state police patrol the area.
Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty Images
14 of 15
|
Police walk near the school after the shooting.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
15 of 15
|
A woman and a minor leave the Uvalde Civic Center on Tuesday.
William Luther/San Antonio Express-News/Zuma
politicize the massacre
Republicans always tend to try to silence talk of gun reform after mass shootings by saying it's disrespectful to the victims to play politics.
But that is a political act in itself.
"You see politicians trying to politicize it; you see Democrats and a lot of people in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn't work. It's not effective. It doesn't prevent crime." Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Republicans struck a remarkably defeatist stance, arguing that trying to stop the massacres was futile.
"At the end of the day, you're arguing about what they're using to commit this, and the truth is these people are going to commit these horrible crimes, whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they're going to find a way to do it." Florida Senator Marco Rubio said.
Meanwhile, Florida's other Republican senator, Rick Scott, told CNN that banning AR-15s, the rapid-fire weapon used by the Texas shooter, would be a mistake: "I think we have in our Constitution our rights to the Second Amendment, and we shouldn't take away the rights of law-abiding citizens.
While the Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms, nothing in the document says that Americans are authorized to use modern and deadly weapons of war.
Even the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon, in a landmark 2008 opinion that cemented the individual right to own a gun, argued that the right was not a right "to keep and bear any weapon in any manner and for any purpose."
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who is extremely tough when it comes to avenging threats to Americans from abroad, has taken a passive position that Washington can do nothing to stop the mass murder.
“This man had no criminal record.
He shot his grandmother in the face.
He bought a gun legally,” he said.
"I can't think of a law that would have stopped this particular shooting."
Graham ignored several possible approaches raised in response to the Texas massacre, including banning people under 21 from buying guns or reviving an expired assault weapons ban, which could possibly prevent future horrors.
But his comment underscored the deeply limited field of vision and stifled debate that Republicans allow themselves, for political reasons, at the moment.
Not surprisingly, Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, whose wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was critically injured after being shot in the head in 2011, said this Wednesday.
"It's crazy not to do anything about it."
Guns in the United StatesUSA Shooting
