So sadly, on Thursday morning on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., it was “déjà vu all over again.” Another shooting on still another campus. Another sick lone male with yet another arsenal of guns and ammunition. Another nine victims.
And, sadder still, when it was all over: another zone of silence.
{mosads}As he had done after the mass murders at Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, Washington and Charleston, President Obama gave a very powerful and emotional statement. But this time he issued no plea for new action on gun safety. And not one member of Congress — not one — proposed any legislation to end the easy access to guns that is the root of gun violence.
Indeed, the only post-Roseburg voices heard were the idiotic comments of White House hopefuls Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom said there’s nothing that can be done about it. Bush, a former Florida governor, merely shrugged it off: “Look, stuff happens.” Trump, the celebrity real estate tycoon, made the same point: “No matter what you do you will always have problems. … There’s always going to be horrible things happening.”
This, of course, is total pap. There is something we can do about the fact, rated true by Politifact, that more Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 than in all U.S. wars since the Revolutionary War. We have more guns, and thus more mass shootings, than any other country on the planet. So yes, there is something we can do. The United States can do what every other civilized country on the planet has done: restrict the number and kind of guns individuals can own, and make them harder to buy.
It’s hard to believe that Chris Harper-Mercer, the killer at Umpqua Community College, was allowed to buy even one gun. It’s insane that he was able to get his hands on 14 — eight handguns, five rifles and one shotgun, plus a mountain of ammunition — within the last three years. Shouldn’t the purchase of multiple guns trigger some alarm during background checks?
Oct. 1, the day of the Roseburg killings, was day 274 of 2015. During that time, as tracked by The Washington Post, we experienced 294 mass shootings, incidents where four or more people were shot or injured by gun violence. That’s more than one a day, most of which we never hear about.
How much worse does it have to get before we demand action?
The truth is, we’ve become a nation of cowards when it comes to gun control. We don’t even use the phrase anymore. Now we have to say “gun safety.” The assault weapons ban expired in 2004, and has never been renewed. Senate legislation by Democrat Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Republican Pat Toomey (Pa.) to expand background checks died in 2013. And nobody talks about registering or regulating handguns since the loss of Proposition 15 in California in 1982.
Roseburg was the 45th school shooting in the United States so far this year. Our cowardice on guns has made every student in America an easy target.
Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “The Obama Hate Machine.”