THE US suffered its 250th mass shooting at the weekend when nine people were killed by a gunman near a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Sixteen others were injured. The gunman was also killed.
This dreadful event happened just 13 hours after an even more deadly incident in El Paso, Texas when 20 victims were murdered. One man was arrested at the scene and it is believed he was acting alone.
No doubt these latest atrocities will reignite the continuing debate about gun laws in the US and oft-heard arguments will be put forward once again. In the past we have heard that teachers should be armed to protect pupils because of the regularity of attacks on colleges and schools. The pro-gun lobby have also put forward the notion that if everyone was armed then such attacks would be harder to perpetrate.
But the problem the US has with deaths by firearms goes much deeper than these horrifying multiple murders. In 2017 40,000 victims died of gunshot wounds. That is the highest figure since 1996 and represents 12 deaths per 100,000 people.
Comparison with other countries illustrates how much more dangerous the US appears to be than many other nations – 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people in Japan, 0.3 in the UK, 0.9 in Germany and 2.1 in Canada. Those were the figures for two years ago but even allowing for a recent sudden increase in deaths by stabbing or shooting in Britain it would come nowhere close to the US figure.
Early indications indicate that the man who carried out the El Paso shooting possibly had a right-wing agenda and that he may have been targeting people of a specific ethnicity. As important as it is to understand why people carry out such heinous crimes, it deflects from the central fact that deadly weapons are far too easily accessible in the US.
Sadly these latest two mass murders are not going to be the last in the US. Nor will there suddenly be an end to the other gun crimes which claimed 40,000 lives in 2017. The only thing which will, eventually, cut down on these figures will be efforts to restrict the availability of such deadly weapons, whether legally or illegally held.
