It hardly matters if and when President Joe Biden is going to visit Nashville, for another horrific tragedy has taken place at a school where three youngsters aged nine lost their lives to a shooter who was determined to wreak havoc that day. And President Biden is not the only one “sick” to his stomach to see firearms are the leading cause of death among children going by statistics put out by government agencies.
What happened at the Christian school in Nashville where a total of six persons died was the 19th shooting incident at an educational institution this year; and the deadliest since the attack on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last May that took 21 lives.
President Biden has been long enough in politics and in the hallways of Congress to know that the tragedy of gun violence is not going to impact lawmakers all that easily, especially a small hard core who always keep looking for reasons and rationales.
The fact that nearly 50,000 lives are lost annually because of an assortments of gun-related injuries or that about 50 people are killed every day by firearms does not seem to move lawmakers who latch on to Second Amendment rights or in one way or another beholden to the gun lobby that keeps repeating the slogan “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”.
Looking for rationales
Even after the horrific Nashville shooting, elected officials seem to look for rationales other than tightening the screws on guns, especially assault weapons.
It is strange that in a country where practically one cannot buy a pack of cigarettes or a pack of six beers until the age of 21, there seems to be far fewer restrictions on the modalities for the purchase of weapons or how it may be carried on oneself. It is said that one could be as young as 14 to have a rifle for hunting purposes.
A 2018 study revealed that there were 390 million guns in circulation in the US, or 120.5 firearms per 100 residents — up from 88 per 100 in 2011. This figure is quite high when compared to those in Europe and Canada.
Interesting, for all that outrage after mass shootings, only 57 per cent of Americans are in favour of gun control; 32 per cent would leave the laws as it were, and 10 per cent felt that laws should be “made less strict”.
The Nashville killing has given an additional handle to the political right. Soon after the shooting, law-enforcement authorities identified the killer, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, as a transgender. That gave the pro-gun hawks a “trans” angle to hammer away their theory that somehow transgenders are far more prone to violence, forgetting conveniently that just about all of the mass shootings in America are the handiwork of cisgender white men and transgenders are victims of violence.
“How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?” posed Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in a tweet. And Donald Trump Jr was not to be left behind. “… rather than talking about guns we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender affirming bullshit on our kids” he said. The sad commentary has been a deliberate attempt by right wing conservatives to try and tweak media headlines from assault weapons to trans-phobia and all the diversions that come along with that.
President Biden’s heart may be in the right place, but deep down he is also aware that he may not be in a position to swing the outrage in favour of an all out ban on assault weapons.
After Uvalde in 2022 Biden did manage to come up with a Bill that was substantial but still far short of coming to terms with banning assault weapons or toughen up background checks. But with 2024 elections round the corner, the White House knows that Congress will have little appetite to tackle the issue favouring Democrats.
The writer has been a senior journalist in Washington DC for 14 years covering North America and the United Nations