America: Too many guns, too little will to change

from the Independent UK:


Rupert Cornwell
Sunday 16 December 2012

America: Too many guns, too little will to change
Newtown, Connecticut, joins a rollcall of towns whose names become synonymous with violent death. The President has a fight on his hands


This column, readers should be warned from the outset, is an exercise in futility. Not a single argument in it is new. It, and the myriad similar ones which have appeared these last 24 hours, might have been published a year ago, five years ago, even 20 years ago. In fact, they were – but in the interim, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. And that is the real tragedy and disgrace of Friday's mass shooting in Connecticut.

The simple truth is that for all the ink spilt and outrage voiced, such incidents have become more, not less frequent since I first arrived in the US in 1991. That October, I was writing my first rampage story, about an unemployed merchant seaman named George Hennard who drove his pick-up truck into a popular restaurant in the small town of Killeen, Texas, before pulling out a couple of weapons and shooting 23 people dead and wounding a score of others.

It was the worst such incident in American history, to be surpassed, until the events in Newtown, only by the massacre at Virginia Tech university in April 2007, when 32 people died. But there have been countless others: Columbine High School in 1999, Fort Hood, Texas, where a deranged army psychiatrist mowed down 13 soldiers in November 2009, and the Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre shootings last July in which 12 were killed. There have been mass killings at Amish settlements and Sikh temples, in offices and car parks, in public places and private homes. Perhaps because this latest horror is freshest in the mind, a disproportionate number seem to take place at colleges and schools. But somehow they all blur into one ghastly whole.

And the aftermath is invariably the same: a day or two of blanket coverage, of unbearably harrowing accounts of innocent lives lost, varying only in the details. There follows suitable but ritual outrage, along with demands for a tightening of America's gun laws – to be met by the familiar, well-honed arguments of National Rifle Association ("guns don't kill people, people do&quot , and invocations of the price to be paid (30,000 people killed each year by guns, half murders, half suicides) if God's own USA is to remain a free country. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/america-too-many-guns-too-little-will-to-change-8420310.html