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      Why did the doctor ask if we have a gun in the house at my toddler’s check up? Because this is America | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Why did the doctor ask if we have a gun in the house at my toddler’s checkup? Because this is AmericaArwa MahdawiAfter taking my daughter to the paediatrician, I was left wondering if I want to raise her in a country obsessed with the right to own deadly weapons A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I took my daughter to a paediatrician in Philadelphia for her one-year checkup. It was all very routine until, squeezed between a discussion about weaning and a question about baby gates, the paediatrician asked if we had a gun in the house. I was so taken aback by the idea that I might casually keep a glock in my knicker drawer that I burst out laughing. “She’s from England,” my wife, also somewhat taken aback, explained. “They’re not used to guns.” The paediatrician gave a sad smile. “I know it’s terrible, but I do have to ask,” she said. “This is America.”Once we got home from the appointment, I looked up whether it really was normal for paediatricians to ask about guns, or if we just had a very vigilant doctor. It turns out that, yes, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that firearm safety is discussed with patients and families. Which makes sense in a country where there are more guns than people and where people get accidentally shot by toddlers on a weekly basis. This is the US – where guns are the leading cause of death for children age one and older, and where the state of Texas restricts dildo ownership (it’s illegal to own more than six dildos) but lets people carry a handgun without licensing or training.Also, uniquely American? The fact that some people seem to think that paediatricians asking about guns isn’t an indictment of American values, but an infringement of their liberties. In 2010, a woman in Florida was outraged over her kids’ doctor asking this “invasive” question, and helped set into motion a years-long legal saga known as “the docs versus the glocks”. The National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbied to get Florida to pass a law called the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, which prevented doctors from asking about gun ownership except in certain circumstances. If a doctor did raise the gun question, they risked losing their licence, and a $10,000 fine. This turned into a protracted lawsuit (the only thing the US loves as much as its guns is lawsuits), and, eventually, a court ruled that preventing doctors from discussing guns violated their freedom of speech. Which was a small win for sanity: now doctors don’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they tell their patients that keeping automatic weapons in their coat closet might be dangerous.My trip to the paediatrician was obviously not the first time I realised that the US has a dysfunctional relationship with firearms. However, talking about shooting while your toddler is getting their shots made the gun situation suddenly feel a lot more personal; I left that doctors appointment feeling very sick indeed. Did I really want to raise my kid in a country obsessed with the right to own deadly weapons? Was it irresponsible to voluntarily bring a child up in a place where 95% of public (state) schools carry out active shooter drills? A country where kids as young as three rehearse what to do if a gunman bursts into their classroom? The UK isn’t perfect by any means, but at least kids aren’t taught to prepare for the very real possibility their classroom might become a killing field.Because this is the US, those questions didn’t have a chance to recede. Shortly after the appointment, 10 people were murdered at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, allegedly by an 18-year-old white supremacist. About a week later, 19 little children and two teachers were murdered in their Texas classroom by another 18-year-old. On Sunday, six minors were shot in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On Monday, a 10-year-old boy in Florida was arrested after threatening to shoot up a school. It never stops. And there seems to be no hope that it’s going to stop any time soon, either. The US supreme court is about to issue its first major ruling on gun rights in over a decade – but the conservative court is widely expected to expand gun rights and make it harder for cities and states to restrict the concealed carry of firearms. For the rest of the world, looking on in horror after the Texas massacre, this is insanity. For conservatives, this is the US.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority | Rebecca Solnit

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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minorityRebecca SolnitGuns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owners rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it’s part of a white-supremacist war cult.Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used.At the time the second amendment was added to the constitution, reload time for the guns was about a minute and all of them were single-shot weapons. By contrast, the Las Vegas killer in 2017 sprayed more than a thousand bullets out his hotel window to kill 60 people in a 10-minute period. The teenager in Buffalo who killed 10 Black shoppers and an armed security guard was not a well-regulated militia, and neither was the antisemite who killed 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the homophobe who killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, or the anti-immigration butcher in El Paso who killed 23 and wounded 23 or the childkiller who took 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 of them six and seven-year-old children.To accommodate the cult of guns and the series of massacres, teachers and children practice school drills that remind them over and over that they could be murdered. To accommodate them, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security, building reinforcements, trainings and drills, and the federal government spends more millions for campus officers. To accommodate them, municipalities across the country spend a fortune on police and equipment, in a sort of arms race that has also justified militarizing the police. To little avail, and in Uvalde the heavily armed and armored police seem to have essentially protected the shooter, by doing crowd control of parents as their children died, rather than rushing in as they had trained and rehearsed and been paid and equipped to do. All this is a sort of tax on the rest of us, in money and well-being, so that the gunslingers can sling their guns.One of the staggeringly disturbing things about the American right wing is that it is a cult manipulated by corporations and vested interests profiting mightily off its obsessions. In no respect is this more true than of guns. Less than two decades ago, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers decided to shift from promoting the culture and equipment of hunting and rural life to hawking high-powered weapons of war and the armor and outfits that go with it, turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone. Fear and hatred increase the profits, and so both crops are cultivated avidly, by the gun industry, the rightwing news organizations, the various pundits and demagogues and militia leaders and neo-Nazis.As former gun executive turned critic Ryan Busse wrote in the Guardian, “As the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry.” Republican politicians gobbled up the industry donations and passed laws making gun sales boom, profits skyrocket, and guns start to show up in new ways. The rage that led to the guns was whetted with racism, anti-immigration hatred, misogyny, war imagery, neo-Confederate fantasies, and cartoonishly vile versions of masculinity, and the guns made it all dangerous. Minority rule perpetrates it, because just as the majority of Americans want abortion rights to stand, so do they want limits on access to guns.Gun culture reminds me of rape culture, specifically the conventions that hold the victims rather than the perpetrators responsible for limiting the violence. For women this means being told to radically rearrange our lives to avoid sexual assault rather than to expect that society will protect our rights and freedoms. We are told to limit where we go and when, to be careful about solitude, crowds, bars, drinks, drugs, naps, parties, public spaces, public transit, strangers, cities, wilderness, to see our clothing and even our appearance as potential provocation, a sort of asking for it. To wither away our freedom and confidence to accommodate a culture of violence. In the same way, we are now supposed to adapt to a culture of guns.The idea of unlimited rights is meant to apply to a limited number of us. Open-carry laws, it’s often noted, wouldn’t allow Black people to wander through the supermarket with huge guns slung over them and the confidence they could impose on others this way; Philando Castile was shot point-blank just for telling a policeman he had a gun in the car in 2016; 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for holding a toy rifle in Cleveland in 2014. And the spate of new abortion laws being passed and the likely overrule of Roe v Wade means that those who can get pregnant are being denied even jurisdiction over their own bodies while gun owners assert their rights over the bodies of others.In Oklahoma, anyone who gets pregnant has fewer rights than a cluster of a few cells visible only under a microscope. Any pregnant woman may face prosecution as a murderer if she doesn’t bring a baby to term. They also face grotesque intrusiveness – criminal investigation for a miscarriage, having to try to prove to an unsympathetic legal system that a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the sense that their pregnancy is supervised and they are potential suspects. There’s a gruesome symmetry to this expansion of patriarchal violence and withering away of reproductive rights.Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years. This is the same party that sought to overturn an election through violence whipped up from on high, by the cult leaders, including the former president and various pundits and demagogues. “Trial by combat,” wheezed Rudy Giuliani as he incited the crowd to go rampage through Congress. If guns are icons it’s because violence is a sacrament defended as a right and an identity.Semiautomatic weapons are instruments of death perpetrated by a death cult. And the carnage will continue until the majority can overrule the minority in power that profits from and perpetrates it. This article was amended on 30 May 2022 to correct the spelling of Philando Castile’s surname.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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      ‘Do something!’: Biden visits Uvalde after mass shooting as onlookers urge him to take action

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      ‘Do something!’: Biden visits Uvalde after mass shooting as onlookers urge him to take action President and first lady seek to comfort community as DoJ launches investigation into police response to school shootingJoe Biden on Sunday visited Uvalde, Texas, seeking to comfort a community devastated by the latest American mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 19 elementary school children and two teachers.The visit marked the second presidential visit related to a massacre within two weeks following a racist attack in Buffalo, New York, as Democrats in Washington offered tentative hope of bipartisan gun reform legislation in Congress.Onlookers cheered Biden but also called out to the Democratic president and visiting Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott about taking action to make America safer for their children.The US president and First Lady Jill Biden, both wearing black, paid their respects at a makeshift memorial site outside the Robb elementary school in Uvalde, laying a bouquet of white flowers amid a mass of candles, flowers, and photographs of the victims.Biden could be seen reaching out to touch the pictures of the children and at one pointed wiped tears from his eyes as he made his way slowly through the memorial.Abbott was close by and since last Tuesday’s shooting has talked about greater security for schools, but not about restrictions on guns, drawing heckling on Sunday. “We need help, Governor Abbott,” shouted one onlooker. “Shame on you, Abbott,” shouted another.Uvalde resident Ben Gonzalez, 35, called out to the politicians and said after that he wanted to see change on several issues, including more gun laws, more resources for mental health and for schools and that it was up to state and federal lawmakers to act.“At a certain point of time it’s going to be on us, because we vote these people in to represent us and they are not representing us and it’s heartbreaking because things like this happen. Something needs to be done, we need change, we need help and my biggest fear is that nothing is going to change, and six months from now Uvalde is just going to be Uvalde, it’s just going to be history and nothing will have changed,” he told CNN.The Bidens walked past the school before being whisked away in the presidential motorcade to attend mass at the local Catholic church, without making public comment.After the service the Bidens left the church and someone in the crowd yelled: “Do something!”The president called back: “We will.”Biden was due to join mourners after the service and, later, first responders, as the US justice department announced it would conduct a critical incident review of the law enforcement response to the shooting, after it emerged that local police had waited for at least an hour outside the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself and opened fire.On Saturday in a speech in Delaware Biden lamented “too much violence, too much fear, too much grief” in repeated gun violence across America, which he called “acts of evil”. 0The Texas visit came as senators in Washington DC, offered cautious optimism over a legislative deal on a package of small-scale gun safety measures. On Sunday, Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said ongoing talks between Senate Democrats and Republicans would involve compromises on both sides of the political aisle.“I think there is something dying inside the soul of this country when we refuse to act at a national level, shooting after shooting,” Murphy told CBS News.“And I do think there is an opportunity right now to pass something significant. I’ve seen more Republican interest in coming to the table and talking this time than at any moment since Sandy Hook,” he said, referring to the devastating mass shooting in an elementary school in his state almost 10 years ago that claimed 26 lives.A small group of US senators began negotiations earlier in the week with a number of control measures reportedly on the table. These include a national expansion of background checks for firearms purchases and the adoption of so-called red flag laws, which allow authorities to order the removal or restriction of weapons from a person deemed to be a public safety risk.But Murphy, who is joined at the negotiating table by a handful of senior Republican senators, including John Cornyn from Texas and Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, made clear that a number of key proposals endorsed by gun control advocates were unlikely to form part of any legislative package. These included a national ban on assault rifle purchases or limits to magazine capacity.Vice-President Kamala Harris made a fresh call on Saturday for banning military-style assault weapons for the general public, as she attended the last funeral for the 10 victims gunned down in Buffalo, two weeks ago in a racist attack on a supermarket in a majority-Black neighborhood. Both the alleged gunman in New York and the one who attacked the elementary school in Uvalde last week were 18 year-olds but were legally able to buy the assault rifles and ammunition they used in the attacks.There remain significant hurdles to achieving any major legislative measures, which have continually faltered in the aftermath of mass shootings in recent years.At least 10 Senate Republicans would need to cast a vote in favor of proposed legislation in order to win the 60 votes required for legislative passage, with the chamber split 50-50 between the two parties.This week, the New York Times contacted all 50 Republican senators to gauge their position on gun reform. Only five have so far indicated a willingness to vote for any legislation, highlighting the power the pro-gun lobby holds over the party.In Texas a handful of senior state Republicans joined Democrats in calling on Abbott to convene a special session of the state legislature, who later said: “All options are on the table”.But any reform is still likely to be an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled state, that has passed successive pieces of legislation loosening gun laws after recent mass shootings.On Sunday, Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw knocked down new restrictions when interviewed on CNN.Crenshaw, a former US Navy SEAL, also claimed AR-15-style assault rifles are “more self-defense weapons” than a tool of war.TopicsTexas school shootingJoe BidenUS gun controlUS politicsJill BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats rush to push gun safety laws after mass shootings as Republicans stall

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      Democrats rush to push gun safety laws after mass shootings as Republicans stallNew York governor seeks to ban people under 21 from buying assault rifles, while California governor intends to sign restrictions, including the right to sue gun manufacturers With Republicans stonewalling for years on any significant federal gun safety legislation, some states are now rushing to take steps themselves following large-scale shootings in New York and Texas this month.Democrats in some blue states are making fresh efforts to reinvigorate proposals toward what gun control advocates call “evidence-based policy interventions”.In New Jersey, Democratic governor Phil Murphy singled out four Republican state lawmakers opposing gun safety and accused them of taking “blood money” while urging them to pass a stalled gun control package that included raising the age to 21 for purchases of long guns, such as assault rifles, and removing laws that shield gun makers from civil lawsuits.Among those Murphy named were state senators John DiMaio, co-sponsor of a bill that would eliminate the statutory prohibition against the possession of “hollow point” ammunition; and Ed Durr, sponsor of a bill to remove magazine capacity limits and repeal a “red flag” law prohibiting guns for people deemed to pose “a significant danger of bodily injury”.“In the face of children being slaughtered to the point where the reports indicate these beautiful children were unrecognizable, I say let these folks come out from behind their press releases and their tweets and cast votes before the residents of this great state,” Murphy said.In New York, where the gunman was charged with first degree murder in the deaths of 10 Black customers and employees of a supermarket in Buffalo two weeks ago, state Democratic governor Kathy Hochul said she would seek – at a “minimum” – to ban people under 21 from purchasing AR-15-style assault rifles.Military-style assault rifles were used in Buffalo and last week in the school shooting in Uvalde, south Texas, by 18-year-olds in both tragedies, Hochul pointed out.“That person’s not old enough to buy a legal drink. I don’t want 18-year-olds to have guns. At least not in the state of New York,” she said.Among the measures Hochul enacted by executive order after the Buffalo massacre was a unit within the state’s office of counterterrorism that would focus exclusively on the rise of domestic terrorism and extremism.As the law stands in New York, a person must be 21 or older to obtain a license to purchase a handgun but the state doesn’t require licenses for long guns, such as shotguns or rifles, and someone can own one at 16. Hochul hopes to get the law through this week.In California – which has experienced a string of mass shootings, including one at a church luncheon two weeks ago – Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has called for tougher gun controls to be fast-tracked through the legislature.“California will not stand by as kids across the country are gunned down,” Newsom said last week.“Guns are now the leading cause of death for kids in America. While the US Senate stands idly by and activist federal judges strike down commonsense gun laws across our nation, California will act with the urgency this crisis demands.”“The Second Amendment [to the US Constitution, on the right to bear arms] is not a suicide pact. We will not let one more day go by without taking action to save lives,” he added.An initial package of bills Newsom has committed to signing include restrictions on advertising of firearms to minors, curbs ghost guns, establish rights of action to limit spread of illegal assault weapons, and the right for governments and victims of gun violence to sue manufacturers and sellers of firearms.However, few Republican-controlled states have followed their lead. Conservative lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Michigan prevented efforts to introduce votes on gun safety legislation, while officials in Texas including the hard-right governor Greg Abbott, have blamed the school massacre there on a gunman with mental health problems, not the fact that he was legally able to buy semi-automatic rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition as soon as he turned 18 earlier this year.“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” Abbott said a day after the Uvalde shooting.At the federal level, a group of bipartisan senators have said they would work through the weekend to reach agreement on steps to limit access to guns, although there are no big moves afoot to ban assault weapons, as Vice-President Kamala Harris called for anew on Saturday, or raise the eligibility age to 21.“It’s inconceivable to me that we have not passed significant federal legislation trying to address the tragedy of gun violence in this nation, especially because since Sandy Hook, we’ve seen even worse slaughter, in Las Vegas, in Orlando,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on ABC on Sunday.Pennsylvania Republican Senator Patrick Toomey said: “Times change. There’s a possibility that might work this time.”TopicsUS gun controlBuffalo shootingTexas school shootingUS politicsNew YorkTexasCalifornianewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Too much fear, too much grief’: Biden visits Uvalde amid scrutiny of police response to shooting

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      ‘Too much fear, too much grief’: Biden visits Uvalde amid scrutiny of police response to shooting Kamala Harris calls for ban on assault weapons after attending last funeral of those killed in Buffalo attackJoe Biden lamented “too much violence, too much fear, too much grief” after the latest US mass shooting as he prepared to visit Uvalde, where police face intensifying scrutiny for waiting outside the classroom where a teenage gunman with an assault rifle killed 19 children and two teachers.The US president and first lady, Jill Biden, arrived in Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday morning, both dressed in black. They visited the informal memorial of flowers and notes that has accumulated outside Robb elementary school, where the carnage took place last Tuesday.Then they will meet families who lost loved ones, and those who survived the gunman’s rampage, followed by first responders, after a relatively long gap between the tragedy in Uvalde and the presidential visit.On Saturday, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, called for a ban on such military-style assault weapons for the general public, while she attended the last funeral of the 10 people killed just two weeks ago in a racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, carried out with a similar gun.Kamala Harris calls for assault weapons ban: ‘We are not sitting around waiting’Read moreThe center of Uvalde was busy but hushed on Saturday afternoon as a long line of people lined up quietly in heat approaching 100F, waiting to place flowers and other tributes at the hurriedly-created memorial of crosses set up for those killed five days ago at nearby Robb elementary school.An ambulance was standing by and a state trooper assisted members of the public who came to mourn.But as well as grief there was anger that has been simmering since Tuesday, when local police waited at least an hour, while young children trapped with the gunman repeatedly called 911 and parents outside pleaded with officers to go in, before federal agents arrived and shot the 18-year-old local man dead.The police department specifically assigned to oversee school security in the area, led by Pedro Arredondo, appeared not to have followed state protocols advising that an “officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker”.0The head of the Texas department of public safety, Steve McCraw, admitted on Friday afternoon that “of course it was the wrong decision” for local officers to wait to enter the classroom.And Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said he felt “misled” and was livid after several days of conflicting accounts about the law enforcement response.Biden spoke about the tragedy in Uvalde during a commencement speech he gave on Saturday morning at the University of Delaware, his alma mater.“As I speak, those parents are literally preparing to bury their children. In the United States of America. Too much violence, too much fear, too much grief,” said Biden and called the Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings acts of “evil”.“In the face of such destructive forces, we have to stand stronger. We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of our people, and of our children,” he said.‘We have to act’: can Biden cut through the gridlock on gun control?Read moreThe US has received increasing criticism from the international community and gun safety advocates domestically over continual mass shootings and the failure of lawmakers to pass gun control laws that could mitigate them.Biden and fellow Democrats have been repeatedly out-maneuvered in the last decade by Senate Republicans, many of whom are backed by the powerful gun lobby.Harris called on the Congress to act, saying: “We are not sitting around, waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. We know what works on this. It includes – let’s have an assault weapons ban.”In Uvalde, Alfred Garza was among several parents who gathered outside the elementary school after reports that a shooting was under way and witnessed officers delaying a move to storm in. He tried not to get in the way. Other parents begged officers to take action.His daughter Amerie Jo, 10, was among those shot dead before federal agents arrived and killed the gunman, Salvador Ramos.“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it just took too long to get in there and, you know, had they gotten there sooner, and someone would have taken immediate action, we might have more of those children here today, including my daughter,” he told CNN.Warning signs about Ramos had been evident prior to his attack, with reports of threatening posts on social media and aggressive interactions with teenage peers.But he was able legally to arm himself with assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition shortly after he turned 18 this year.His mother, Adriana Martinez, gave a short television interview earlier in the week, saying in Spanish: “I have no words to say. I don’t know what he was thinking,” adding: “He had his reasons for doing what he did. Please don’t judge him. I only want the innocent children who died to forgive me.”TopicsTexas school shootingBuffalo shootingUS gun controlJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘We have to act’: can Biden cut through the gridlock on gun control?

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      ‘We have to act’: can Biden cut through the gridlock on gun control?The president has long fought for restrictions but deep divisions have often left him hamstrung Less than two hours after returning from a five-day trip to Asia, a visit meant to signal American strength, Joe Biden walked slowly into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, visibly shaken, to address one of the nation’s greatest weaknesses.Another bloody mass shooting in America. This time in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, making it the deadliest shooting at an elementary school since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.It was just 10 days after a gunman had targeted Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people. And just nine days after a gunman opened fire in a Taiwanese church in southern California, leaving one dead and several wounded.“Why?” Biden said, his voice rising in anger. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”Nearly a decade after watching Republicans defeat a gun control package he helped develop as vice-president in response to the shooting at Sandy Hook, Biden’s wrenching search for answers to this uniquely American tragedy continues.He entered the White House with a sweeping plan to address gun violence, but too-narrow margins in Congress to see them enacted. Once again, the president finds himself stuck between a desire to act and the limits of power to do so.Washington’s shame: how previous bids to tighten gun laws have failedRead more“I am sick and tired of it,” Biden said this week. “We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”On Sunday, Biden will travel to Uvalde to honor the lives lost. He will grieve with the community as a father who knows the pain of burying a child. But as the president, it is unclear what he can deliver.Biden said on Wednesday that “the idea that an 18-year-old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war, designed and marketed to kill, is, I think, just wrong,” declaring: “The second amendment is not absolute.”Any hope he had of action from lawmakers on Capitol Hill was seemingly tempered by decades of false starts and failures. He called on Congress to pass “reasonable” gun safety laws and urged the Senate to take a “modest step” by confirming his nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).“We’re always looking to do more,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday. “But right now we need the help of Congress.”Encouraged by the White House, Democrats have thrown themselves into the gun control debate anew. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who was the congressman representing Sandy Hook at the time of the massacre, began talks this week. But they face long odds in drafting a bill that can garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster.Speaking at a gun safety rally on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Murphy acknowledged a feeling of “dejà vu” in the wake of these tragedies, when vows of “never again” are followed by gridlock and inaction. He asked supporters for help building the public case for action, urging a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans.Democrats say the discussions will not be open-ended and have vowed to force Republicans to take votes on the issue if no compromise is reached in the coming weeks.“I’m not going to negotiate for ever,” Murphy told reporters after the rally.Hours later, Senate Republicans blocked legislation introduced by Democrats that would have strengthened the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism and white supremacy in response to the racist attack in Buffalo, a stark reminder of the deep divisions between the parties on how to address gun violence in America.The White House pointed to a flurry of executive orders Biden has signed as part of the administration’s “whole of government” response to the nation’s “epidemic of gun violence”. One would strengthen regulations on “ghost guns”, homemade firearms without serial numbers that are increasingly recovered at crime scenes. Another launched a team of strike forces to crack down on illegal firearms trafficking in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and DC.Additionally, they have launched efforts to prevent veteran suicides by firearm, increase community policing and tighten regulations on “stabilizing braces” that have been used in mass shootings.But the steps fall short of Biden’s campaign promises to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and his embrace of a federal gun buyback program to take more weapons off the streets.In the absence of congressional action, gun safety advocates believe Biden can do more with his bully pulpit and his pen.“We need the president to bring this issue to the national level consistently, even when there aren’t mass shooting tragedies rocking the nation,” said Po Murray, chair of Newtown Action Alliance, formed after the Sandy Hook massacre. “He needs to make this issue a daily priority until we start reducing gun deaths and injuries in this country.”Murray is among the advocates urging the White House to establish a federal office of gun violence prevention and issue a national emergency declaration to more forcefully confront the issue. Others have called on Biden to appoint a gun “tsar” or use his executive authority to expand background checks on firearm purchases and reform the ATF.Greg Abbott backs out of NRA appearance amid fury over eventRead moreJohn Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said Biden had been the “strongest gun-sense president in history”. But he is urging the White House to issue an executive order that would clarify the definition of gun sellers so that more would be required to conduct background checks on prospective buyers.During a press briefing this week, Jean-Pierre stressed that this had been a top priority for Biden for much of his political life. “Look, this is a president, as I’ve said already, who has been working on gun violence, comprehensive gun reform, since he was a senator.”But a reporter pushed back: “Isn’t that more of an indictment” that he has been working on this issue for so long and so little has changed?Jean-Pierre replied that Biden had done “more via executive actions than any president in their first year” to combat gun violence, but understands that we need to do more.”“We are angry as well,” she said.Biden’s frustration is borne of decades of experience working on the issue, one of the most divisive in American life. As a senator, he played a key role in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004 when Congress failed to renew it.Years later, when Biden was vice-president, Barack Obama tasked him with the mission of developing a fresh wave of gun control measures in response to Sandy Hook. The team proposed a slew of executive actions that Obama ultimately signed, but a parallel legislative effort failed in the Senate in 2013.Matt Bennett, a vice-president of the Democratic thinktank Third Way, who worked with Biden’s team on gun control legislation after Sandy Hook, said Biden knows his options are limited without Congress.“When he ran the taskforce in 2013, they did their damnedest to find every single thing Obama could do by executive order, but there’s just not that much,” he said. “Trust me, they’re looking under every rock.”Wading too deeply into the legislative debate as talks begin on Capitol Hill could upset the already-fragile negotiations, he added.“Biden understands that this can’t be the ‘Biden bill’ or else it has no hope,” Bennett said.In Uvalde, Biden will once again play the role of first responder to a nation reeling from tragedy. But in the days and weeks that follow, advocates hope the president will seize this moment to relentlessly pursue meaningful policy reform.“He can be savvy but he cannot be complacent,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, a gun violence protection group founded by the former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt that left six people dead, “because we cannot continue this cycle of mourning.”TopicsTexas school shootingJoe BidenUS politicsUS gun controlUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship? | Jonathan Freedland

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      America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship?Jonathan FreedlandThis devotion to the right to bear arms is horrifyingly outdated. It brought terror to Texas – and it will happen again and again America’s great appeal to the world was its promise of possibility. It presented itself as virgin territory, a tabula rasa where a society could form anew, free of the past, and where individuals might do the same, reinventing themselves, renewing themselves, starting over. It was a myth, of course: it took no account of those people who were already there, and whose lives and lands were taken, or of those who had been brought to America in shackles. But it was a powerful myth all the same, one whose grip on the global imagination lives on: witness the success of the stage show Hamilton in seducing yet another generation into the romance of a new world and its revolutionary creation.But now we see something else: a country uniquely burdened with the dead weight of its past, and therefore powerless either to deal with a danger in its present or to make a better future. The land of possibility stands paralysed, apparently unable to make even the smallest change that might save the lives of its young.The evidence came again this week in the Texan town of Uvalde, where an 18-year-old walked into an elementary school and killed 19 children, aged between eight and 10, and two of their teachers. It was the 27th school shooting in the US this year, and it’s not yet June.There are so many stats like that. In the US, 109 people die of gun violence every day. There have been more mass shootings in the US in 2022 than days of the year. There are more guns in America than there are people. It was Uvalde this week, but last week it was Buffalo, where another 18-year-old walked into a supermarket and killed 10: his animus was directed at black people rather than children, but his method was the same.Each time, the satirists at the Onion bring out the same headline: “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens”. The joke gets at something critical and curiously un-American: a debilitating form of fatalism.After Uvalde, I spoke to several seasoned Washington hands, asking if the horror of this latest massacre might at last prompt action. No, was the reply. Of course, each side makes the same ritual moves. Democrats deliver stirring, even heartbreaking speeches. Republicans then accuse Democrats of “politicising” tragedy, preferring instead to offer “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, before suggesting every possible remedy except the obvious one: this week we had Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas demand an end to the menace of unlocked back doors in schools. Not one of them will so much as entertain the idea of, you know, making it a tiny bit harder for a disturbed teenager to get hold of a military grade assault weapon.The easy explanation for this refusal to act is money, specifically the cash put in the hands of pro-gun politicians by the National Rifle Association (whose annual convention, addressed by Donald Trump, is going ahead this weekend in Houston, Texas, with the massacre in Uvalde deemed no reason to reschedule). But that is too pat. The NRA has been weakened by a slew of recent scandals, yet Republican politicians still refuse to pass even the mildest gun safety measures. The glum truth is that it’s not a lobby organisation that has a hold on them so much as pro-gun voters, who have concluded that if a politician dares suggest, say, the massively popular move of requiring universal background checks – looking for a record of instability or past violence – before selling someone an AR-15, they have taken the first step towards government confiscation of citizens’ guns.That, of course, is seen as an unconscionable violation of the constitution’s second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Never mind that no Democrat is advocating anything like the action Britain or Australia took after mass shootings, all but banning guns, and never mind that it’s hard to believe that the framers of the constitution were intent on allowing unhinged teenagers access to weapons that could kill en masse and in seconds. That slippery slope argument, combined with the sacred status accorded to the second amendment and the constitution itself, has immobilised Republican politicians.Their opposition matters because they have far more say than the number of votes that they win might suggest. Under the US system, every state gets two senators, no matter how many or how few people live in that state. It means mainly white, mainly rural states with few voters – but strong views on guns – exercise an effective veto on more populous, more diverse, more urban states, whose tens of millions of voters are desperate for gun safety measures. That’s why even the modest proposals that followed the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012 died in the Senate. And that’s why so many feel fatalistic about the prospects of change, resigning themselves to another massacre and then another.Some try to keep the fatalism at bay, insisting that with the NRA weak, now is the time to strike. They propose a march on Washington of a million parents and their children. Or a consumer push to demand the Republicans’ corporate donors withhold their cash until the party acts on guns. Or maybe even international pressure, with foreign leaders raising gun violence with their US counterparts the way they’d raise human rights abuses when meeting representatives of China. The US Senate banned assault weapons back in 1994 (before allowing the ban to expire a decade later): if they did it once, they can do it again.But those defiant voices are in the minority. Most believe that the state of America’s politics has condemned the US to suffer a fate the rest of the democratic world has avoided. Beyond the mortal threat that represents to Americans, that despair, that sense that political effort is futile and that change is impossible, endangers US democracy and the country’s very sense of self.That it arises out of the constitution – its second amendment and its design of the Senate – is a bitter irony. The whole point of the American revolution enshrined in that document was to forge a society that could make the world anew, able to adapt to the present unbound by the strictures of the past. In the words of the great English-born revolutionary Thomas Paine, who argued that circumstances always changed from one generation to the next: “As government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.” Today’s America is sacrificing the living in the name of the dead of two centuries ago. It is betraying its founding ideal. It is offering up its young to placate ghosts from a time long gone.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      Eighteen-year-old Americans can’t drink. Why can they buy assault rifles? | Ross Barkan

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      Eighteen-year-old Americans can’t drink. Why can they buy assault rifles?Ross BarkanThe solution to mass shootings isn’t increased policing or an expanded surveillance state or runaway anti-terrorism legislation. It’s making it harder to buy a gun The mass shooting at an elementary school in Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers, was a reminder of all the ways the United States has failed its people. A nation that still retains promise, America is now held captive by political polarization and a fanatical gun lobby. There are more firearms in the US than people.It’s important to remember, as these mass shootings continue to occur, that the problem is guns: all of them, not just assault rifles, but handguns too. The assault weapon ban, which lapsed in 2004, should be renewed. Somehow, it must become much harder in this country to buy a weapon. No 18-year-old, especially one with such a deeply troubled history as the alleged Texas gunman, should be able to buy a firearm.My daughter was killed at Dunblane. I know that gun controls save lives | Mick NorthRead moreAfter the racist shooting at a Buffalo supermarket earlier in the month, the Democratic establishment temporarily swung away from the scourge of guns to the scourge of online misinformation and how to crack down on it. Democrats of all ideological stripes swiftly backed new legislation that would “improve intelligence-sharing” between law enforcement agencies, building on a bill that passed the House Judiciary Committee that would create permanent offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and FBI to “monitor, investigate and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism”. The proposal would also improve training for local police to detect and investigate what they believe is terrorism.Since the motivations of the Texas killer are more opaque, there has been less talk about such measures. This is for the best. Measures to empower federal surveillance state apparatuses inevitably backfire, leading to the abuse of civil liberties, particularly endangering vulnerable populations. American Muslims after 9/11 understand the danger of unleashing DHS or the FBI on so-called terrorism suspects. The term remains vague enough to encompass all kinds of people who may, for whatever reason, appear suspicious to overzealous federal officials.Using mass shootings to expand the power of DHS would be a serious error, one that would inevitably punish the left when Republicans take power again. Donald Trump or another rightwing president would not hesitate to reclassify various progressive organizations or movements as domestic terrorism, especially if they reside beyond the political mainstream.The focus must remain on guns. It’s understandable, in one sense, that Democrats would shift to fretting about expanding the purview of a Bush-created agency: taking action is immediately plausible. There may be enough votes to pass the bills and invite bipartisan support. Banning assault weapons or even instituting increased background checks has been a political dead-end for so long because the gun lobby owns the Republican party and many rural voters are gun-owners.This is the intractable challenge. Democrats do not have the votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. The recurrence of mass shootings – Sandy Hook, Parkland, El Paso – has not budged Republicans, who continue to deny the reality that America is the only affluent nation that grapples with such gun violence and death. Mental health initiatives are fine, but the problem is the number of people who are able to, without any effort, buy guns and shoot them. Mass slaughter is not as easy with a knife. Armed security at every school building in America, logistically impossible, still could not stop a determined murderer with military-grade weaponry.The handgun dilemma must also be solved. Democrat-run states have cracked down on them and are chasing after the ghost-gun manufacturers that create untraceable weapons. But guns continue to flow across state lines, avoiding detection from police. Gun violence of the more regular kind plagues cities everywhere. Every one of those murders is deeply tragic.If the federal government is paralyzed, Democrats must redouble their efforts in various state legislatures to flip chambers and win executive offices. This may be the only answer. States individually can do a great deal on the gun control front. If limiting access to guns is unpopular in conservative states, Democrats must find ways to campaign on other issues and implement safety laws once in power. For starters, there should be more bipartisan consensus around raising the age of gun purchases. If 18-year-olds cannot legally drink, why can they buy firearms? Since most violent crime is committed by the very young, cutting off guns to teenagers could make a small difference.No matter what, Democrats cannot succumb to nihilism or seek dangerous, stopgap measures that infringe on civil liberties. Runaway terrorism investigations will not stop gun violence. Making it far harder to acquire a weapon will.
      Ross Barkan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of Demolition Night, a novel, and The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York
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