THE United States had another mass killing last Saturday – 20 killed, 26 wounded – when a man armed with a military firearm, believed to be an AK-47, entered a busy Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, and simply started firing at the crowd. A few hours later, another gunman killed nine people and wounded 27 in Dayton, Ohio. The killings took place less than a week after a similar shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California, which left four dead and 15 wounded.
The mayor of El Paso, the governor of Texas, and the nation’s president all condemned the Walmart killing, extended their condolences to the victims’ families, and vowed to take action to avert a repetition of the incident. But if all past mass killings by one or two gunmen in that country are any indication, the El Paso incident would soon be forgotten – until the next shooting incident.
Mass killings like this have become common and happen with regularity in the US. Only last May, 12 were killed by a gunman in a municipal building in Virginia, Beach, Virginia. Earlier in January, five were killed in two parishes in Louisiana. In the same month, five hostages were shot dead in a bank in Sebring, Florida.
In the previous year, 2018, in February, a former student killed 17 and wounded 17 others in a high school in Parkland, Florida. A student killed 10 and wounded 14 in a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, in May. Eleven were killed and six wounded in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October. Thirteen were killed and 12 wounded in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in November.
October, 2017, saw the biggest number of victims in many years – 58 dead and 422 wounded when a lone gunman fired from his hotel room at the crowd at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada.
After all these incidents, there were calls for the government to impose restrictions on the purchase of firearms in the country, especially on the sale to civilians of military firearms capable of spewing out hundreds of bullets in seconds. But the US Congress has refused to enact any such restrictions which could be deemed violations of Amendment 2 of the US Constitution.
Nineteen Democratic Party presidential aspirants were in Las Vegas to speak before the nation’s largest public employees union at the time of the El Paso killings. “All over the world, people are looking at the United States and wondering what is going on,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said. “What is the mental health situation in America? Where time after time after time after time, we’re seeing indescribable horror?”
We are among those in the world asking that question. Imposing some restrictions on gun ownership, especially on military arms by civilians, might help, if the US Congress finds a way to enact them without violating the US Constitution.
As for the matter of mental health of Americans mentioned by Senator Sanders, that may be a much more difficult problem to resolve. The killer in El Paso had driven nine hours to the city and appeared to have targeted the people in the mall which were mostly Latinos as the city shares the same downtown area as Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. He could have been driven by the racist rhetoric now often heard from some high US officials.
