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Editorial: Desperately seeking gun control

Despite the House of Representatives passing the Bill last year, the Senators have refused to vote on it, allegedly fearing backlash from the gun lobby represented by the National Rifles Association (NRA).

Editorial: Desperately seeking gun control
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CHENNAI: Last week, a teenage gunman killed as many as 19 students and two adults in an elementary school in Texas. The event took place two weeks after another youth shot dead 10 black people in a supermarket in Buffalo. The school shooting invoked memories of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut in 2012, which saw 26 fatalities, of which 20 were children. Such tragedies are nothing new as far the US is concerned. In 1999, two teenagers carried out a massacre in the Columbine High School, Colorado, which was then referred to as the deadliest school shooting incident in the US and had claimed 13 lives.

The latest tragedy at the Tulsa medical centre was yet another reminder of how the US government has failed its people again with regard to gun control vis-a-vis background checks and limiting the supply of certain types of firearms. It might be remembered that the Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects an individual’s right to bear arms. The US has over 300 mn guns, which is essentially one for every citizen, or precisely 120.5 guns for every 100 people. Its gun death rate is about 3.4 per 1,00,000 people. Compare this to Japan which has about one gun per 100 people, with a death rate of fewer than 10 people per year. On an average, 32% of households in the US possess one or more firearms. And studies have also shown that an incidence of gun ownership in the house is associated with an increased risk of gun death, mostly by suicide, and by homicide.

It’s not that the public and politicians in the US have not highlighted this issue before. President Biden called out the all-powerful gun lobby in the US, for blocking enactments of gun safety laws founded on common sense. About 50 Senators are stalling on a Bill called the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021 that is aimed at expanding federal background checks on individuals purchasing guns. Despite the House of Representatives passing the Bill last year, the Senators have refused to vote on it, allegedly fearing backlash from the gun lobby represented by the National Rifles Association (NRA).

The US is one of the few nations where such vested interests of the firearms industry has taken precedence over human life. In 1996, the UK witnessed a shooting at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, which killed 16 pupils and a teacher. Following the incident, two new Firearms Acts were passed in the UK, which banned the private ownership of most handguns within the nation. Since then, there has not been a single school shooting incident in the UK.

More recently, in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand in 2019, where 51 people were killed by a lone gunman, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern drove the enforcement of legislation banning almost all semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. The law was passed unanimously and immediately.

Experts have suggested a slew of gun control measures including redefining gun control as gun safety under the ambit of public health. They also recommend preventing those with a history of domestic violence from owning guns, restricting sale to those under 21, safe storage, including trigger locks and limits on the numbers of weapons that can be purchased each month. Stakeholders have also called for research on smart guns that fire only upon the validation of a PIN or fingerprint. There are calls to end immunity and subsidies for the firearms industry too. America needs time to heal, but it’s essential that the lessons learned from such senseless acts of violence and the countermeasures required to combat their recurrence in the future are not forsaken in the larger interest of the gun lobby.

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