Yet another mass shooting

At least 26 innocents are dead after a gunman opened fire with an assault-type rifle during Sunday morning’s church service in a small Texan town. It is the worst mass shooting in modern Texan history; it comes five weeks after the worst mass shooting in modern US history, when 58 people were slaughtered in Las Vegas. But do such grim superlatives have any power to mobilise change? Surely the photo collage of the 20 schoolchildren who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut was among the most heartbreaking images of our times. Yet what happens after each mass shooting? Candlelit vigils and political condemnation of an individual incident with little reference to the scale of the problem, let alone any promise of a solution. The bleak outlook is captured by satirical website The Onion’s headline: “ ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Mass shootings in the US have been getting worse since the 1980s. According to a Washington Post analysis, shooters brought an average of four weapons to each mass shooting and each gun on average killed four people. The founding fathers of the US could not have envisioned the second amendment allowing hate-filled citizens to build up arsenals of high-powered weapons with which to slaughter large numbers of their fellow citizens in a matter of minutes. An 18th-century provision to do with the right of “a well-regulated militia” to keep muskets has been parlayed into an almost unfettered individual right to assault weapons. In principle, a change such as this ought to be reversible.

Yet for all his eloquence and empathy Barack Obama, president at the time of Sandy Hook, could not do it. Donald Trump may seem an unlikely source of hope — he has championed the second amendment — but he at least has a direct line of communication to the American masses who must be talked around if there is to be any change. It would require real leadership. John Howard faced personal and political risks to ban semiautomatic rifles after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, but consider his legacy: there are Australians today who owe him their lives.