Slaughter of innocents, again

As Barack Obama said after 20 children and six adults were gunned down in five minutes at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012: “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics is too hard?’’ For him they were. And Donald Trump, backed by the powerful National Rifle Association in his campaign, refuses to open up a gun control debate even after the Ash Wednesday bloodbath in which at least 17 students and adults were massacred at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

In October, after retired accountant Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people from a high-rise hotel room in Las Vegas, we expressed the faint hope that President Trump’s populist credentials might allow him to make headway on gun control in a nation with as many firearms as people. Cracking down on automatic and semiautomatic guns would be a start.

There will be little progress until Americans recognise that the gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is “craven rubbish’’, as Australia’s former ambassador to the US and military historian Kim Beazley noted last year. It was not originally about gun rights, he said, but about defending the US by raising a low-cost army in which soldiers provided their own guns. Each mass shooting undermines the greatness Mr Trump seeks for his country — an argument he is well-equipped to sell.