The Limit Does Not Exist: Gun Violence and Our Endless “Enough”

Firearm ownership per 100 people

I had a different post prepared for today. Then there was another school shooting, this time at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. As of this writing, 10 people were killed.

At once, Twitter filled with outpourings of grief and outrage. People asked when we, as a nation, would finally decide that enough was enough. That we find it unacceptable that we cannot attend class or see a film in a movie theater with the level of safety one would assume we are afforded by nature of our rich, industrialized country. That we are fed up with the cycle of politicians expressing their sympathy and then failing to pass laws that would protect us.

There have been 45 school shootings in the United States in 2015. There have been 142 school shootings in the United States since the shooting at Sandy Hook in December 2012. Remember how everyone thought we would, finally, pass stricter gun control legislation? By the time the next school year started in September 2013, gun control hadn’t even made it out of the Senate.

What, exactly, was in this squashed bill? Expanded background checks and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Scary, Second-Amendment-violating overreach, right? As Tim Kreider noted in a May 2014 article, the bill “was summarily killed in the Senate for no reason other than that a sufficient number of United States senators are owned by the NRA.” (If you would like to see if your congresspeople receive funds from the NRA, Open Secrets has a list here. To find the phone numbers for your congresspeople’s D.C. offices, look here.)

Kreider’s article was penned following the Isla Vista killings, where, 140 miles from Claremont, a man decided to “have his revenge” against women, for their unforgivable failure to have sex with him. As Kreider observed then, “We’re content to forfeit the lives of a few dozen schoolkids a year as long as we get to keep our guns.”

This attitude apparently hasn’t changed. What is most frustrating is that it doesn’t have to be this way. According to 2012 data complied by The Guardian, there are 88.8 guns per 100 people in the United States. Research on developed countries shows that high rates of gun ownership translate to higher homicide rates. In this land of the free and the brave, our homicide rate is about 20 times the average among OECD countries (excluding Mexico). If that’s a little too abstract, research by national expert Dr. Jacqueline Campbell also indicates that “access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times compared to instances where there are no weapons.”

I called one of my senators today. I have to believe that, one of these days, we really will have had enough.