The Parkland Massacre & The Pressing Need for Gun Control

16 of the 17 fatal victims of the
Parkland school shooting
(From NBC News)

Another day, and extremely saddening and confounding to have to say, another school shooting, this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida. Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, a 19-year-old expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, arrived on the school campus at 2:19 pm and, according to reports, began his terroristic assault  using a AR-15 assault rifle, ultimately killing 17 students and teachers, several of whom sacrificed their own lives to save others, and wounding over a dozen more. Cruz managed to escape with the fleeing students, walking to a nearby Walmart and then a Subway, but was later apprehended by police at 3:41 pm that same day as he strolled down a nearby residential street.

Reports suggest that despite Cruz's deeply troubled history at home and in school, the young man was able to purchase the AR-15 legally, in February of last year. Orphaned after the death of his adopted father, Roger Cruz, roughly ten years ago and his adoptive mother, Lynda, of pneumonia last November, he had been living at the home of a former schoolmate, whose parents apparently knew about the assault rifle and other weaponry he possessed. Cruz also had been working at a local dollar store at the time of the attack.

In addition to his expulsion, Cruz apparently was known for virulently racist and anti-Semitic postings online. Cruz has been pictured wearing a pro-Trump red cap, and a white supremacist leader also came forward to say that Cruz was linked to his group and had trained with them, though that assertion remains under scrutiny. One neighbor had videotaped Cruz firing off a BB pistol, and classmates stated that, before the murderous assault, they were concerned that Cruz might commit such an attack. Indeed, one teacher came forward to say that the school had been warned not to let Cruz bring a backpack onto campus. The FBI had received a warning about one of Cruz's disturbing social media posts on YouTube, in which he supposedly wrote that he wanted to "be a professional school shooter," but their followup produced no leads. The Bureau has since expressed regret for not being able to do more.

New York Times reporters Julie Turkiewicz, Patricia Mazzei and Audra D. S. Burch note in their roundup of news about the Parkland incident that "with this shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have come within the last three months." Since Adam Lanza's 2012 mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 438 people--children, adults--have been wounded in over 200 school shootings, and 138 have died. Moreover, there have been eight school shootings through the first seven weeks of the new year; to put it another way, as the Guardian points out, "guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year."

School shootings since Sandy Hook, in 2012
Gunshot victims in school shootings:
Red dots = killed; pink dots = injured
(from New York Times)

Under any measure, this is a horrifying and unacceptable situation, though the persistence of such attacks, going back decades (remember Columbine?), and the continued inaction of the US Congress in tightening a range of gun laws--or even severely restricting access to firearms--underlines why these mass tragedies have become almost routine. Indeed, Congress and many stage legislatures, in thrall to the National Rifle Association and similar groups, have moved in the opposite direction, to loosen gun laws, allowing concealed carry provisions, guns in college classrooms, and so on.

At the time of the time of the Newtown massacre, then President Barack Obama vowed to address the crisis with legislation, and received support from many Democrats in Congress. But Republican leaders and legislators in the House and Senate refuse to enact new strictures, or even reauthorize lapsed ones, like the assault weapons ban. Early last year, Donald Trump even signed away the gun check regulation President Obama had put in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to acquire firearms. I should note that while violent crimes have plummeted in the US since the 1990s, other forms of violence, ranging from police killings of suspects to these mass murder events have not slowed. The US remains more armed than some entire foreign militaries, and guns, especially ones than can kill large numbers of people, are too easy to sell and purchase.  One parallel I noted on Twitter was the US's barely discussed but extensive wars across the globe, which continue under Trump's watch as they did under Obama, who inherited a number of them from George W. Bush; these external, almost shadow wars mirror the ones occurring inside our borders, where certain kinds of violence and, as we witnessed yesterday, slaughter have essentially become normalized.

One difference this time may be the outspokenness of the young survivors, who have not been silence since this incident. From outraged parents to students calling out Congress, Florida's governor and legislators, and Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, the outcry looks like it may have some effect. The key word, of course, is "may"; again and again after these unspeakable tragedies, which do not occur anywhere else in the world outside of wartime conditions with the frequency they do here, we have heard calls for regulation gun access, but the NRA and Republicans--and even some Democrats--stall meaningful legislation. Let's hope that this time is different, and that those slain and injured in Parkland receive at least one tribute they merit, which is to spur those in positions of power to do something, beginning with reinstituting sane gun laws and eventually going much further, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire a human-killing machine, in order to prevent any more massacres of this kind.