Why America cannot stop mass shootings and gun violence

Here is a brief list of facts that merit the phrase “American exceptionalism” and help explain why, halfway through the year, researchers have recorded 234 mass shootings – defined as incidents with at least four victims killed or wounded. 

*** There are more guns (an estimated 393 million) in private hands than people (337 million) in the United States, more than in any other country. 

*** Owning guns is a right enshrined in the constitution. 

*** Decades of attempts for tighter controls on the purchase of guns have had little success, thanks largely to an efficient pro-gun lobby, the National Rifle Association. 

*** The most popular rifle in the United States is the AR-15, a semi-automatic civilian version of the fully automatic M-16 used by the military. 

*** The Supreme Court has tended to rebuff legal cases arguing for restrictions, with one rare exception in June. 

In that case, eight of the nine judges upheld a federal law that bans violent domestic abusers who are subject to restraining orders from possessing firearms. 

Gun safety advocates celebrated the decision as a victory for millions of women and families who are affected by a growing crisis of domestic violence often involving abusers using, or threatening the use of guns. 

But that victory, on June 21, came just a week after the Supreme Court struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, devices that can transform a semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15 into a  weapon that can fire at a rate equal to a fully-automatic rifle like the M-16 – up to 800 round per minute. 

The rule was introduced by the administration of President Donald Trump in 2018 in response to the worst mass shooting in American history.

On October 1, 2017, a 64-year-old real-estate investor, Stephen Paddock, opened fire from his room on the 32nd floor of a luxury hotel in Las Vegas on attendants of a music festival below. He killed 60 people and injured more than 500 of the 22,000 concertgoers, firing more than 1,000 rounds from AR-15 type rifles fitted with bump stocks. 

Even in a country where mass shootings have become part of life, the scale of the massacre shocked the public and spurred the gun-friendly Trump administration to start proceedings for a ban. In an untypical move, the NRA issued a statement that “devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.” 

After prolonged technical debates over the issue, the Trump administration, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), promulgated a regulation reclassifying rifles equipped with bump stocks as machine guns, which have been illegal since 1934. 

The ATF ordered owners of bump stocks either to destroy them or surrender them to the ATF or face criminal prosecution. The bureau estimates that around 520,000 bump stocks were in circulation at the time of the ban. It is not known how many, overall, were destroyed or surrendered. 

But it is known that an Austin gun shop owner, Michael Cargill, surrendered two bump stocks and then filed suit to challenge the rule on the “machine gun” classification. It made its way up the legal bureaucracy to the Supreme Court, which is now composed of six staunch conservative justices, all appointed by Republican presidents, and three liberals, appointed by Democrats. 

The 6-3 ruling striking down the ban on bump stocks came with a highly technical opinion that focused on the phrase “single function of the trigger” and explained that the justices had consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary to agree on a definition of “function.” 

Thus, they came to the conclusion that firing a fully-automatic weapon required a single action of the trigger by flexing a finger while a bump-stock “merely reduces the amount of time between separate “functions” of the trigger.”  

The conservative justices might have been better informed by watching a variety of videos from gun enthusiasts that show how the force of a gun’s recoil results in firing bullets at the same speed as a fully-automatic weapon. 

Writing a sharply-worded dissent for the liberal minority, Justice Sonya Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of fixating on obscure technical arguments and ignoring common sense. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she said. 

The common sense of guns Sotomayor appealed for is in short supply in a country awash with guns.

The Supreme Court’s decision drew sharp criticism from Democrats in Congress and survivors of the Las Vegas shooting. It’s a safe bet that none of them have the slightest interest in the mechanics of the firearm that rained death from a hotel window. 

The ruling highlighted two important aspects of American exceptionalism. One is that the United States is the only country where Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure. Other countries have term limits – 10 or 15 years – or compulsory retirement ages.  

The other “only in America” feature is  the immense power and lack of accountability of the highest court. As then late justice Antonin Scalia put it: “A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”