Gun violence in US unlikely to end anytime soon

HERE we go again! I hate to write this, but over the years that I have been covering the United States I have adopted a sense of almost fatalism when it comes to the recurring horror that has unfortunately become as American as apple pie: The ghastly mass shootings that have extinguished the lives of some 1,500 innocent people since 2009 in this country.

Just in the last three weeks since May 14 when an 18-year-old man shot 13 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, it has become a human challenge to count the number of these horrific massacres or, for that matter, just to look at the pictures of the victims: Men, women and even children who have been slaughtered by fellow Americans in gun attacks that turned peaceful communities to what President Joe Biden described last Thursday evening (June 2) as “killing fields”.

In fact, since the devastating attack on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, that took the lives of 19 children and two teachers, and before President Biden addressed the nation on the subject last week, 20 more shootings occurred around the country including outside a liquor store in Michigan; at a private party in California; in a town in Tennessee; and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at least four people were killed last Wednesday. And this was followed by yet another spate of gun violence over the three days between last Friday and Sunday that left several more dead and dozens injured.