The awful truth: Why Americans will continue to kill their children

It is about 2½ hours down the road along Interstate 35 from the small Texas town of Uvalde to Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin.

Uvalde, population 15,000, had been known for its annual Honey Festival and rooting for the Coyotes, the local high school football team, who (naturally) play at the Honey Bowl.

Until now.

Now the quiet and close-knit town takes its place with other quiet and close-knit communities in the United States permanently scarred by a senseless mass shooting.

The 2022 Honey Festival, planned for this weekend, has been cancelled. They are too busy grieving for their children after an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 elementary school kids and two teachers on May 24.

US President Joe Biden said: “As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

There is grief but no shock because everyone has seen it before and knows they will see it again. Between the day of the shooting and the publication of this article, about 1000 Americans will have been shot dead.

Ten presidents ago, Johnson pushed through the last significant piece of gun-control legislation.

Yet he knew it wasn’t enough. On signing the 1968 Gun Control Act, he said: “This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them.

“If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing ...

“The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.

“But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgement, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must — somehow, someday — make our voices felt.

“We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilised nations have long ago adopted.”

That was 54 years ago and nothing has changed. In fact, the annual number of gunshot homicide victims has tripled and the number of guns in the community more than doubled.

Now, there are about 400 million guns in America — more guns than people — and after every mass shooting, politicians invoke the name of God and call for prayers.

God didn’t refuse to support sensible gun-control laws, they did.

As a crime reporter, I have known more than 30 people who have been shot, such as gangster Mario Condello, who tried to pick an argument with me in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. After he calmed down, we had a reasonable chat, agreeing to catch up in a couple of weeks. We never did because he was shot dead outside his Brighton home.

Like police officer John Kapetanovski, whose quick reflexes saved his life. He threw his arm up and deflected the bullet that would have hit him between the eyes. His partner, Rod MacDonald, was shot but returned fire, killing the gunman, Pavel Marinof, known as Mad Max.

February 25, 1986: Rod MacDonald is stretchered from a Victoria Police helicopter after the shootout with Pavel Marinof, aka Mad Max.Credit: Jim McEwan

I have been to the funerals of crooks and cops and seen the ashen faces of those they have left behind. Far too often, I have been to the Police Chapel to see flag-covered coffins, hear the lone piper and see the honour guard that snakes out of sight.

I have also sat and talked to police whose lives have been permanently altered after they went to work on a routine shift and ended up shooting someone.

It is not a game. It is not a movie. It is not politics. It is life and death.

Seven prime ministers ago, John Howard didn’t just pray for the victims of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were shot dead by a lone gunman, he decided to take on the gun lobby. He didn’t go to church to pray for change, he went to parliament to make the change.

In the previous nine years, there had been nine mass shootings in Australia with 49 victims (beginning in Hoddle Street in 1987, where seven people were shot dead).

Gun laws were a state matter and Howard — who had been elected only six weeks earlier — didn’t have to buy in. He had nervous National Party coalition partners, whose electorates included a strong pro-firearm element.

John Howard wears a bulletproof vest under his jacket as he addresses gun owners in Sale, Victoria. Credit: Colin Murty

The smart political move would have been to express sympathy and leave it to the states. The right thing was to take control.

It was not just politically but physically brave — he had to wear a ballistic vest at one public rally.

Within 12 days, he had a national agreement for gun reform. It wasn’t easy.

While most state premiers immediately agreed, he threatened the hesitant with a referendum to make gun control a federal power.

One million firearms have been destroyed due to the buyback and subsequent gun amnesties.

Since then, we have had one mass shooting in 2019, involving four deaths, in Darwin. (A mass shooting is defined as four or more fatalities in a random attack.)

And the lack of easily accessible firearms has resulted in a series of terrorist attacks in Australia being thwarted when would-be offenders were identified trying to buy guns.

In this country, we have many problems but, due to a group of national and state politicians prepared to stay the course and stand up to the firearms lobby, gun murders is not one of them.

Texas and Australia have roughly similar populations, yet Texas exceeds Australia’s annual murder rate every seven weeks.

In Texas, they have 6000 bars and 8000 gun dealers. It is illegal to buy a drink there until you are 21, but you can buy a military-grade semi-automatic rifle at 18.

In Australia in 2019-20, there were 35 gunshot murder victims, a total exceeded in the US every 15 hours.

If Australia had the same population as the US, at our current gunshot homicide rate there would be 444 deaths a year. In the US, it is about 20,000.

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks that cost nearly 3000 lives shocked the world. The fact US residents shoot and kill that number of fellow residents every eight weeks shocks no one.

America is in an arms race with itself. More shootings don’t lead to reasoned debate but to more people buying guns for “protection”. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought firearms. The percentage of households with firearms is rising.

Any suggestion that AR-15 semi-automatic rifles could be banned leads to panic buying. Now one in five guns bought in America is an AR-15. The reality is nothing is better for the gun business than a mass shooting.

An AR-15 is the civilian version of a military weapon originally designed to kill people. It fires about 40 bullets a minute. Its point target range is 550 metres. This means an average shooter will hit a human-size target 50 per cent of the time. Its maximum range is 3.6 kilometres.

You can buy a budget model AR-15 in the US for less than a good TV and about the same price as a nice suit — a suit you could wear to a funeral.

In the US, schoolchildren who should be playing hide and seek are drilled on how to hide from someone who wants to kill them with a store-bought military-grade weapon.

There are community videos on what to do to protect yourself from a mass killer, the way we have ads on how to deal with a bushfire. Both, it would appear, are considered natural events.

Three-and-a-half hours from Uvalde, in Houston, they held a bigger function than the Honey Festival. It was the convention of the National Rifle Association, the powerful lobby group that holds many seemingly powerless American politicians hostage. One-time serious presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz told the conference: “What stops armed bad guys is armed good guys.”

Elsewhere, another politician suggested farmers needed AR-15s to protect their chickens from raccoons. This would be entirely sensible if raccoons were armed with anti-tank guns and wore military-grade ballistic vests.

November 24, 1963: John F Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is shot dead by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby as police look on.Credit: AP

The only thing that stops idiot politicians are sensible citizens with a vote. Therein lies the problem. Americans lack the will to change.

Did we mention the other big city in Texas? That would be Dallas, where in 1963 president John F. Kennedy was assassinated with a carbine rifle bought for $19.95 on mail order by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Two days after the assassination, Oswald was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Ruby used a .38 Colt Cobra revolver he bought for $62.50 at a local store.

Kennedy’s deputy, Lyndon Johnson, was sworn in as president and at least tried to take on the gun lobby.

The 10 presidents who followed him have prayed for the dead.

God bless America.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.