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By APD writer Lu Jiafei
On the eve of the Chinese Spring Festival, I woke up to the breaking news that 17 people were shot dead in a shooting spree at a high school in South Florida. Was I shocked? Yes, but also no.
We shouldn’t pretend that this massacre caught us off guard. After all, in the wake of the record-breaking slaughter in Las Vegas last October, where 58 concert-goers were shot dead, and another mass shooting one month later in Texas, where more than two dozen churchgoers were killed, we were, unwittingly or not, expecting the next bloodshed to occur.
Callous as it may sound, the American public, as former U.S. President Barack Obama once noted, “have become numb” to mass shootings.
According to Mass Shooting Tracker, a well- quoted online database of U.S. mass shootings, the shooting massacre at Major Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last week was the 41th mass shooting which happened in the United States this year. And since the first day of 2013, there have so far been 1984 mass shootings.
In contrast to the high frequency of mass shootings, the political elites in Washington have barely nudged towards reasonable gun control laws. Each time when an attention- getting rampage happened, what politicians could offer were merely “thoughts and prayers.”
Despite the high frequency of this man-made atrocities, the Florida high school shooting still stood out, because the tragedy happened in a place where security for the youth should be the top priority of the authorities.
But again, gun violence on campus in the United States is not a rare anecdote. Rather, it is part of the fabric of life in U.S. schools.
According to an ongoing Washington Post analysis report, more than 150,000 students from over 170 U.S. primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, where two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before committing suicide.
The first time gun violence on U.S. campus drew my attention, it was in December, 2012, when a 20-year-old man with an AR- 15 started a shooting spree at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the U.S. state of Connecticut. Twenty kids and six school staff were killed.
At that time, the nefariousness seemed almost inconceivable and the call for stricter gun control laws was deafening. With a president eager to push forward his liberal agenda, it seemed almost certain that the incident was the last straw.
It was not. As usual, under the auspice of the powerful lobbyist group the National Rifle Association (NRA), Republicans in the Congress blocked former President Barack Obama’s gun control proposals from getting a vote. The effort to regulate gun control has since then been completely stalled.
As a result, among other outrageous flaws of existing U.S. gun control regulations, the rampancy of AR- 15 rifles in mass shootings has become an American nightmare.
Touted by the NRA as “the most popular rifle in America,” AR- 15 rifles are the semi- automatic civilian version of the military’s M- 16 combat rifles.
Apart from last year’s Las Vegas concert massacre, the Texas church massacre and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the AR- 15 rifle was also used in the Orlando nightclub massacre in June, 2016, where 49 were killed and 58 others were wounded. And this time, the shooter of the Florida school massacre again chose the AR- 15.
Another day, another bloodstained school, another upended lives. Unfortunately, with a Congress infamously known for inaction on gun control under the NRA pressure, and a new president who on the campaign trail shamelessly declared allegiance to the NRA by saying that “I will never let you down,” the American carnage continues.
Lu Jiafei, researcher of APD Institute. After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Lu moved to Washignton, D.C. and covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump’s upset victory. He is a political contributor to APD.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
