Imagine an eight-year-old splashing about in a public park. Maybe you were that child once, or the child is your son or daughter, your grandchild.
Then imagine you are sitting by a bed in a hospital ward where the child you treasure is fighting for life.
That was the scenario being played out this past weekend in Michigan after a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle on people in Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad Park.
Nine were injured in the shooting, two of them children. The eight-year-old was hit in the head.
The shooter – we don’t use the word ‘gunman’ for fear it would glamourise him (and yes, shooters are mostly men) – used a 9mm semi-automatic Glock. Another gun was found where he was staying.
The man shot himself dead before the police could get him. Good riddance you might say, but there is a good chance that he was a victim too.
Victim or not, one thing is certain. He should not have been sold a semi-automatic weapon.
The American obsession with owning firearms is, to most of us, incomprehensible. Though, it must be said, it is a desire not unknown on this side of the Atlantic, where people have also been murdered going about their everyday lives.
But in the US, the ‘right to bear arms’ has been elevated to the level of a state religion. Its high priests are the members of the Supreme Court, and its most fanatical adherents are so-called Christians who champion the rights of the unborn while dismissing the right to life of gun crime’s many victims.
By last Sunday, the Gun Violence Archive, which monitors mass shootings, had recorded 221 this year alone. We have had fewer days this year than that.
Almost 19,000 Americans died last year through gun violence, more than 36,000 were injured. Those aren’t numbers, they are people – like you and me and those we love.
The dead included 297 children and 1,385 teenagers. Already this year 641 people under the age of 18 have been shot dead in the United States.
Every time there is a mass shooting there is outcry, a wringing of hands, and then everything returns to normal.
Even Democrats, who are the most vociferous proponents of gun control, tend to pull their punches rather than confront the weapons cult and its adherents. So normalised has shootings of this kind become that I couldn’t find a story on the attack in my online edition of the New York Times.
What it had reported on, however, was the split decision of the US Supreme Court last week to declare a ban on ‘bump stocks’ an abuse of administrative power.
Such is my ignorance that I didn’t know what a bump stock was. In short, it’s an attachment which allows a semi-automatic rifle to fire faster.
They were banned by executive order during Trump’s presidency after a shooter used one to murder 60 people at a country and western concert in Las Vegas in 2017.
The judgment came down to whether or not the ‘bump stock’, which can cost as little as $99, turned a rifle into a machine gun. Using one, the Las Vegas shooter was able to fire some 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes.
Machine guns are strictly controlled, but the bump stock is a way round that. That’s how its advertised.
As has become increasingly the case in a Supreme Court packed with Republican Party nominees, the judgment split on ideological grounds, with the three more liberal justices voting to uphold the ban.
The opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas – whose wife supported the insurrection at the Capitol building and who is, himself, mired in controversy for accepting gifts which might compromise his impartiality. It focused on the mechanics of what made or didn’t make a weapon a machine gun.
This decision sums up all that is abhorrent about the United States, once a beacon of hope for the world, and now a cesspit where former presidents incite insurrection and the law is on the side of mass murderers and companies which supply them with their weapons
The common sense approach is to look at outcomes. Dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that a skilled gunman can fire some 180 rounds a minute using a semi-automatic rifle. A bump stock allows them to fire 400-800 rounds a minute. If that’s not a machine gun, what is?
She wrote: “Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences. The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”
This decision sums up all that is abhorrent about the United States, once a beacon of hope for the world, and now a cesspit where former presidents incite insurrection and where the law is on the side of mass murderers and companies which supply them with their weapons - legally.