Insane gun laws at root of atrocities

How very sad it is that the first-sentence reaction to Sunday’s mass murder at a concert in Las Vegas — at least 58 people killed, more than 500 injured — must contain the word “relief” but it seems unavoidable.

In the few hours between the turkey-shoot slaughter and the public identification of the killer as Stephen Paddock, aged 64 and from Mesquite, about 120km northeast of Las Vegas, it was hard not to wonder what President Donald Trump’s reaction might be had the killer been from IS or another anti-Western terrorist organisation.

Composure, calm, restraint or proportionality are not characteristics of his presidency or personality. His reaction to the greatest mass murder in modern American history had it been a belief-driven attack would probably have been excessive, counter-productive and inflammatory. The air in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan too would be thick with drones seeking out exemplary if implausible revenge targets.

President George W Bush’s bullhorn address, with former Democratic mayor of New York Ed Koch standing at his side on the World Trade Center rubble in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was the starting point for a litany of death and destruction, radicalisation and hate, that is intensifying to this day. Hundreds of thousands of lives — a tiny proportion American — have been lost in the intervening 16 years. It is hard to imagine that President Trump’s response would not have been even more extreme and dangerous. The world stability graph would be pushed further towards the red zone.

Unnerving speculation about how commander-in-chief Trump might have reacted cannot help those who lost a loved one in the Mandalay Bay Hotel but it does underline the challenge facing White House apparatchiks ready to question his short-fuse, childish responses on one issue after another.

One response that the victims’ relatives, America (especially, Trump’s USA! USA! USA! supporters) and the world need not fret about is the prospect that he might try to bring even a sliver of sanity to America’s gun laws. His predecessor Barack Obama tried but failed to have legislation enacted to make it difficult for people like Paddock to have a military grade automatic rifle. Paddock, who had at least 10 other rifles in his 32nd-floor hotel room, was a deranged citizen but with the lethal capacity any civilised society confines to its security forces. He was better armed than many soldiers serving with UN peace missions or with Nato.

America pays a very heavy price for its anachronistic frontier values. There have been 338 mass shootings, defined as an event where at least four people are shot, in America this year. The Mandalay slaughter was number 337. Number 338 happened later in Lawrence, Kansas when three people were shot dead in a midnight attack.

This tolerated barbarism is a blot on America and points to a complacency incomprehensible to the rest of the world. The natural sympathy we all feel for those murdered is coloured, though not at all undermined, by a sense of relief that we live in a comparatively safe, sane society where access to guns is strictly controlled.