It is now a well established ritual. Every time there is a shooting, politicians say they are horrified and issue press releases denouncing the violence. The Democrats are stepping up and trying to pass laws to impose gun restrictions. The Republicans, they begin by praying for the victims and then call to arm themselves more by equipping teachers with guns, for example. A dialogue of the deaf that has been going on for years as mass shootings in supermarkets, churches, high schools have become so frequent that they mostly go unnoticed on a national scale and are immediately forgotten.
Will the massacre of 19 children and two teachers in a Texas school by an 18-year-old change things? No one in Washington believes it. If Congress was unable to pass laws after the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage in 2012 where 20 kids aged 6 and 7 and 6 teachers were killed by a lunatic, or after the shooting of the Parkland High School in Florida in 2018 which had given rise to a strong mobilization, it is hopeless.
The Democrats have shown little interest in the subject since taking office. A few months before the elections, there is little chance that they will even try to revive the debate. Last week, after the massacre of 10 black people in a Buffalo supermarket, few called for reform. “When in the name of God are we going to do what we all know in our guts needs to be done?” Joe Biden said after the Texas shooting. “It is time to act… There is so much we can do.” But does the president really want to bring this thorny subject back to the fore on which all his predecessors have broken their noses? He has far more pressing priorities. Above all, it is a losing battle, because the Democrats will never obtain the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation in the Senate.
A public opinion favorable to a certain control
Republicans for years have opposed everything, even the most modest measures, in the name of the sacrosanct Second Amendment. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook shootings, the Senate almost succeeded in passing a text on universal background checks for arms buyers. But the Republicans and a few conservative Democrats derailed it. Just like two other bills on banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines. And since then, everything has been blocked in the Senate. Hours after the school shooting, Ted Cruz, the far-right Texas senator, said on CNN: “Inevitably, when there’s a murderer like this, you see the politicians trying to politicize the case. . You see the Democrats and a lot of people in the media, whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. It doesn’t work.” Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, blamed the psychiatric problems of the killer, “an unbalanced young man”, which makes it possible to shift the debate from weapons to the issue of mental health.
And yet, public opinion is in favor of a certain control. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 87% of Americans want to prohibit people with mental illness from acquiring a gun and 81% support background checks. Two-thirds want to ban high-capacity magazines. In another recent poll, 41% of voters think it is very important (and 18% somewhat important) that elected officials impose tougher gun laws.
Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, announced that he would relaunch negotiations between the two parties. But “the prospects are weak. Very weak, he said. We have burned our wings so many times.” Meanwhile, there have never been so many weapons in circulation, which explains the mass violence. There would be 400 million in the United States, according to a survey by the Small Arms Survey in 2018. That is more than the 330 million Americans. Sales have exploded since 2020, driven by protests for more racial justice, the pandemic, the election of a Democratic president… As for the annual production of weapons, it has almost tripled since 2000, from 3 9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. Enough to provoke new massacres.