U.S. partisan bickering hinders fight against surging gun violence
As the United States continues its COVID-19 fight, the perpetuating issue of gun violence continues to shatter communities, resulting in a human rights catastrophe for the country.
While shooting incidents occurred sporadically during Independence Day weekend, no major U.S. city had experienced a weekend as bloody as Chicago, where at least 10 people were killed and about 31 others wounded since Friday night.
More U.S. officials were publicly warning of a potentially violent summer. Though cities across the United States were witnessing a surge in violence, bipartisan consensus on tackling the issue was absent in Washington.
GUN VIOLENCE SPIKES
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown has called the Fourth of July weekend the "most challenging weekend of the year" for police.
However, it was by no means the bloodiest weekend for the Windy City. According to The Chicago Sun-Times, at least 78 people were shot in the last weekend of June, a third of whom were victims of four mass shootings.
As the country scrambles to contain COVID-19 with a rising death toll, a disturbing trend of increased violence is also looming large.
After years of falling crime rates, statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed gun violence surged across the United States with no signs of abating, increasing by 25 per cent in 2020, the first time the United States had seen over 20,000 annual murders since 1995.
According to data provided by the White House, the number of homicides in the first quarter of 2021 was 24 per cent higher than it was in the same period of 2020 and 49 per cent higher than in the first quarter of 2019.
The Washington Post in a report in June quoted data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive that said 54 people were killed by shootings in the United States every day during the first five months of 2021, 14 more deaths than the average toll during the same period over the previous six years.
PARTISAN BICKERING
Confronted with rising violence at home, the White House in late June scrambled to unveil a new crime prevention strategy, focusing on the illegal sale of firearms, law-breaking gun dealers and better community support.
Warning of a "more pronounced" summer spike in violence, U.S. President Joe Biden appealed to the nation on June 23 in a televised speech from the White House that "this (gun violence) should not be a red or blue issue."
Republican and Democratic political elites diverge on the reasons for the surge in violence.
For Republican lawmakers, the "defund the police movements," which sprouted up nationwide after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, are to blame.
On the other hand, though the Biden administration's new anti-crime strategy intends to invest more in police forces - not defund them - by drawing from portions of the 1.9 trillion U.S.-dollar COVID-19 relief package, the focus remains on passing gun control laws, a formidable task given the lack of bipartisan consensus.
In April, the White House announced several executive actions on gun control, including cracking down on "ghost guns," self-made guns which lack serial numbers used to trace them.
As Democrats were pressing for gun control legislation, Republican-dominated states were forging ahead to expand firearm access, with local legislatures managing to remove permit requirements to carry a handgun.
PUBLIC OPINION IGNORED
It wasn't only sweeping gun legislation that failed to pass in Congress. In fact, despite rampant mass shootings across the country for decades, Congress had not allowed any U.S. federal studies on gun violence until last year.
In the 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted two high-profile studies which concluded that the risks of having a loaded gun at home outweigh the benefits.
Realizing that such studies would be used as a catalyst for gun safety reforms, the powerful lobbyist group the National Rifle Association (NRA) pressured Congress to kill future federal-funded studies.
In 1996, the NRA succeeded.
Since 1996, the CDC's appropriation bill had explicitly stipulated that none of the funds made available to the agency "may be used to advocate or promote gun control," and the CDC hasn't done any such studies since then.
In 2009, the National Institutes of Health also conducted a similar study which found that a person carrying a gun was about 4.5 times more likely to be shot in conflicts than one without a gun.
Again, two years later restrictive funding for the organization was imposed by Congress.
Yet stringent gun legislation has consistently won majority support from the public.
Aside from some drops during Barack Obama's presidency, support for the "stricter" option had been consistently over 50 per cent since 2000.
In a Morning Consult-Politico tracking poll published in April, researchers found that approximately two in three Americans said they support greater restrictions on gun ownership.
You would think common sense would prevail among U.S. politicians, these self-proclaimed "defenders of democracy and human rights," to follow public opinion and pass gun legislation to protect Americans. Unfortunately, common sense is hard to find in Washington these days.
Source: Xinhua; Editor: Huaxia
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