The country continues to reel from Sunday’s horrific mass shooting, in which a gunman killed 26 Texas parishioners and injured dozens more. The brutal attack, in which the shooter is reported to have shot multiple crying babies, has been politicized to hell and back, on both sides of the aisle. Common sense gun control. Ban bump stocks. Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns. It’s just the price of freedom. The real cause is mental illness. We’ve heard it all.
There is one point that cannot be argued, however. These spree killings are on the rise. The number of “active shooter” incidents have skyrocketed in the past two decades. America in the year 2000 was plagued by just one shooter that deliberately sought out populated areas. 2015? 20 shooters. That’s one horrifying episode every 18 days. 2017 is set to be the deadliest year in our history, with 114 confirmed deaths so far. Las Vegas was just over a month ago.
So, yeah. This is who we are now. Every few weeks someone gets ahold of some guns and kills a bunch of people. That’s just the way of things.
You know who else agrees that active shooting incidents have become part of our national identity? The FBI.
Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, took part in a Texas press conference today and told reporters that the numbers of active shooters are “on the rise.”
Combs also acknowledged that this isn’t going to change anytime soon, and he suggested that every American needs to prepare themselves for the eventuality that they may become involved in one of these massacres.
“I think everybody, no matter where you are, needs to think about this,” he said. “If you’re in a school, if you go to college, if you’re at the movies, we should all be thinking about ‘what are we gonna do if a crisis breaks out right here?’”
The FBI special agent went on to sadly propose that all Americans should learn to protect themselves, to train to become one of those good guys with a gun.
“There are a lot of programs out there. The FBI supports programs. We teach law enforcement. There’s private community programs out there,” he said.
“I think we ought to think very hard about this and make sure that we are prepared.”
Additionally, ATF officials noted at the same press conference that the shooter’s rifle appears to be a semiautomatic but has yet to be test-fired.
Past as prologue, we’ll continue this discussion in approximately three weeks. See you guys then, if you make it.
[Image via screengrab]
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Sound familiar? It does to American citizens who must regularly study these bloody rituals and be left by political leaders to passively anticipate the carnage next time.
In the aftermath of the Texas horror, politicians led by President Trump are trying to steer away from the obvious issue of what to do about the gun industry’s wanton sale of military-style rifles and pistols on the domestic market.
Mr. Trump called the rampage a “mental health problem at the highest level” and not “a guns situation.” This is the cynical evasion devised by the National Rifle Association, which warmly endorsed candidate Trump, who now parrots the diversionary talking point that we must first control for mental illness.
In fact, President Trump signed a law in February revoking an Obama-era regulation that made it more difficult for the mentally ill to purchase guns.
Mr. Trump, who spoke favorably as a candidate of vigilante shootouts for self-defense, also suggested that if a civilian had not briefly exchanged shots with the Texas shooter after the massacre, the casualty toll “would have been much worse.” The implication was that the bloodshed in Texas, which also included more than 20 wounded, actually makes the case for more guns — that the disease of gun violence is also its cure.
This is a fantasy, not a rational argument; it doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny. As our colleague Nicholas Kristof notes, the United States outstrips the world in both gun ownership per capita and gun deaths per capita. States with higher proportions of gun ownership also have rates of death by guns higher than the national average. Incidents in which victims kill attackers in self-defense are vanishingly few compared with gun homicides, and suicide is by far the leading cause of gun deaths.
From expanded background checks to assault weapons bans, proposals put forward by gun-safety proponents, unlike continually increasing private American arsenals, would do something to thwart mass shootings. The Texas killer was not motivated by racial hatred, as was the killer of the Charleston churchgoers, but by family grievance, underlining the lethal combination of domestic abuse and firearms. Abusers’ access to guns increases the risk of intimate partner homicide as much as fivefold, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. While federal law prohibits those convicted of domestic violence, as Mr. Kelley was, from buying or possessing firearms, the Air Force failed to add him to a federal database, allowing him to pass necessary background checks. The right law was on the books but enforcement was lax.
And yet so many politicians continue to promote the wares of the gun industry. Two years ago, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas tweeted “I’m embarrassed: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind California. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA.” On Monday he said the problem was out of human hands.
“We have evil that occurs in this world,” Governor Abbott declared, as if from a pulpit, equating all manner of global terrorist attacks, including the murder of eight last week by a truck driver in Manhattan. When asked how the evil of gun violence can be overcome, he replied “you do that by working with God.” Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, even envisioned “arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond” if another massacre occurs.
This is the level of pro-gun argument being offered by Republican leaders and some Democrats. It is made in service to the N.R.A. and the gun industry, not the American public.
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