“When will this happen again, Daddy?”
This was what a scared seven-year-old kid asked his father several hours after 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, drove to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and shot to death 20 of the kid’s schoolmates and six adults, including the school principal, in another surge of senseless violence in the United States.
The kid, who survived the shooting incident at the Connecticut school on Friday, asked what many people asked: “When will this happen again?”
It has happened many times before, and it was, in fact, the fifth such mass killing incident in the country this year. In July, 24-year-old doctoral student James Holmes barged into a theater with two assault weapons and killed 12 moviegoers while injuring 58 others before killing himself in Aurora, Colorado. Just a few days ago, a man with a semi-automatic weapon killed two persons in an Oregon shopping mall then killed himself.
Last month, gunman Jared Loughner was jailed for life for killing six people in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011 in an attack that targeted congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at point-blank range but survived.
The Connecticut attack surpassed the 15 killed in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, and was second only to the 32 dead victims in the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, both of which triggered fierce but inconclusive debates about the United States’ relaxed gun control laws. But this latest senseless act of violence claimed the lives of 20 very young children, who probably did not even have an idea of the word violence.
In all these incidents, the guns – most of the automatic or semi-automatic weapons – were purchased legally. The Colorado gunman even purchased 6,000 rounds of ammunition online. That’s how easy it is to buy guns and ammunition in this country that boasts of the Second Amendment, a constitutional provision that protects the people’s right to possess guns.
The powerful National Rifle Association and gun owners hide behind the Second Amendment each time the call for stricter gun control is raised after every such surge of violence involving guns. And each time, they insist that “guns do not kill people; people kill people.”
And yet, we all know that without those powerful firearms, those mass killings wouldn’t have happened. One thing is common in those mass shootings – a gun that carries and releases lots of ammunition in seconds. As the Manila Times correctly pointed out in its editorial, “The NRA is wrong, dead wrong. In the hands of unsound minds, guns kill people.”
Because of the lax gun control laws or the absence of it in some states, many people who shouldn’t own a gun in the first place – criminals, gangsters, mentally and emotionally disturbed people – are able to buy guns. People outside of the military and law enforcement should not be allowed to own assault weapons or automatic weapons that hold lots of ammunition. Stricter rules for owning guns should also be imposed.
It is hoped that with the terror and grief that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, more so because the victims were children between the ages of 5 and 7, Washington would finally do something about the problem.
American lawmakers have not approved a major new gun law since 1994, and they let a ban on certain semiautomatic rifles known as assault weapons expire in 2004. Cited as a major reason for this non-action by the Democrats is the intense lobbying by the NRA and other gun groups, and fear of a backlash from gun-owning voters. The Republicans, on the other hand, have always supported gun ownership.
President Barack Obama tearfully said on national television that the country needs “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies.” But with the White House still locked in discussion over ways to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, it is doubtful if Obama and the Democrats would push gun control at this time.
When the grief and anger over the killing of the 20 elementary students and the six school officials subsides, we hope that the cry for stricter gun control would not be reduced to a whimper as what happened weeks after the mass killings in Columbine High, Virginia Tech, Aurora cinema, and in Tucson, Arizona.
The rhetoric against gun violence should be turned into action immediately. Otherwise, another kid would be asking his dad again soon: “When will this happen again, daddy?”
(valabelgas@aol.com)