A GUNMAN empties his clip, killing six people and wounding 14 others. He reloads but is wrestled to the ground before he can do more damage. He is then taken to jail.
A scene from a wild west movie? Unfortunately not. The enactment is a real-life drama played out at a public function in Tucson, Arizona, USA, earlier in the week.
A college dropout went on a shooting rampage, leaving a trail of death and injuries in its wake. He was apparently venting his anger at something or someone. Only he knows what or who.
Among the dead in another of those unprovoked attacks that have bloodied the American landscape were an Arizona Federal District judge, John Roll, and a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green, born on September 11, 2001.
The wounded include Arizona Congresswoman, Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, now fighting for her life in hospital after being shot point-blank in the head.
The shooter, brandishing a semi-automatic pistol during the bloodbath, is 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, an academic failure. His exact motives remain unknown but the butchery he perpetrated (against his fellow citizens) has shocked the entire American nation with many asking will the madness ever stop.
There are other amok shootings. In 1999, 15 people were killed and 24 injured in the Columbine High School massacre carried out by two teenagers — Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17. They later killed themselves in the school library.
Another gunman Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech in 2007, killing 32 people before committing suicide while army major Nidal Hasan also killed 13 people during a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas – all chilling reminders of senseless killings by Americans of Americans.
Successive US administrations seem unable to prevent a recurrence.
In the Tucson shooting aftermath, the debate has shifted to the toxic tone of US political discourse and whether it may have precipitated the attack.
Loughner is believed to have a mental issue. The County Sheriff office opines “unbalanced” people are particularly susceptible to vitriol but notes people tend to deny vitriol can inflame the public, calling it free speech instead.
Giffords herself had noted her inclusion in the list (with a gun-related imagery) of lawmakers Tea Party champion Sarah Palin was targeting for defeat during the 2010 mid-term election.
“When people do that, they have got to realise there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said back then.
Rival US politicians want the fiery rhetoric toned down but are continuing to blame one another for spitting poison. Some have described the Palin map, listing Giffords as a target, as a sign of toxic rhetoric that has crossed the line.
Even as the debate over the use of gun imagery in US politics is raging, an American writer notes that Palin is not the first politician to use this approach, claiming it’s something everybody — Democrats, Republicans and media – has done.
Loughner’s purported targeting of Giffords is still being investigated but enforcement agencies admit they are greatly hampered in identifying and tracking potential threats by the copious silver-tongued sparring on the Internet.
Americans, on the whole, think the shooting is a heinous crime and call for more civility in politics, concurring that freedom of speech or expression “is not the right toput up maps with gun crosshair targets over elected politicians while inciting people not to retreat but to re-load.”
At least six US states, including California, New York and New Jersey, ban high-capacity magazines. While California imposes additional mental health restrictions, gun activists say these would not likely have prevented the Loughner attack.
The relative ease in obtaining firearms could be a reason for shooting rampages in the US. Even after the Tucson carnage, gun sales in Arizona have increased, prompting one observer to remark: “You can buy a handgun in Arizona in just five minutes. To buy a gun, nobody calls anybody.”
Americans’ romance with guns traces back to the American Revolutionary War. The militia and frontier ethos drawn from the country’s early history is firmly entrenched in the American way of life.
The US Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment protects the right of an individual to own a firearm for the purposes of self-defence within the home while at the same time reaffirming the constitutionality of a wide range of long-standing gun control laws.
The American gun lobby is very powerful — in fact, so powerful that even the White House can do little to rein it in despite the loss of so many American lives to berserk shootings over the years.
A favourite tagline of the gun lobbyists is that guns don’t kill people – only people kill people.
That may be so but guns make it a whole lot easier for people to kill people. That’s the stark reality.