Irish Examiner view: No political will to stop the carnage

A law enforcement officer walks as people are evacuated from the shopping centre. Picture: LM Otero/AP

It is only May, but almost 14,000 people have already been killed in mass shootings in America this year.

Be it in a shopping centre, school, church, supermarket, or cinema, it does not appear to matter where and when these massacres occur. 

The staccato burst of automatic fire has become the signature tune to an ongoing and seemingly endless American tragedy and, it appears, there is no will — politically or otherwise — to stop the carnage.

The latest mass killing occurred in a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, at the weekend when there were at least 15 victims of the heavily armed Mauricio Garcia, a 33-year-old with apparent right-wing and white supremacist sympathies. Eight of those have so far lost their lives.

Despite heartfelt pleas from officials nationwide — right up to president Joe Biden — for this unprovoked violence to stop, there is no indication it will. 

Neither is there any sign that politically, there is any real will to curb gun sales.

According to the investigative US magazine Mother Jones, 20m AR-15 assault rifles have been sold in the country, 14m of them in the last decade alone. 

Rather than limiting the sale of these murderous weapons, many states are relaxing the rules on their ownership and the background checks on those buying them.

Texas’ Republican governor, Gregg Abbott, and the state’s Republican senator, Ted Cruz, were vilified at the weekend for once more parroting that their prayers were with the victims. America, it is widely agreed, needs more than prayers to stop this ongoing violence.

The reaction in the US to these latest killings was markedly different to that in Serbia which, in the past week, saw two unprecedented mass shootings.

Reacting to the two killing sprees, which saw 17 people killed in just under 48 hours, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic pledged to act quickly to stop further indiscriminate gun violence in his country.

Serbia has one of Europe’s highest rates of gun ownership, but there was an immediate political pushback in the aftermath of last week’s two shootings. 

President Aleksandar Vucic straight away pledged action for “an almost complete disarming of Serbia”. 

America would do well to follow his example but, as we know, because of political intransigence and a gun industry that heavily bankrolls support for the second amendment to the US constitution in which the right to bear arms is enshrined, it is a pipedream, and the slaughter will almost certainly continue unabated.