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For the second time in a week, a man with a gun has killed Americans who were simply going about their day. On Monday, a gunman killed 10 people, including a police officer, at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.
A week earlier, a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent at three massage parlors in Georgia.
Now, a stunned nation again wonders how this keeps happening.
We don’t yet know many of the detail s of the Colorado shooting and there is still more to learn about the Georgia killings. But, we do know that guns were involved in both. Guns have also been used in the long, sad trail of mass murders that runs through Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland and dozens of other places.
After each horrific event, Americans mourn for the dead and some pledge that things must change. Legislation may be introduced. It often goes nowhere at the federal level as freedoms and the supposed futility of gun control are debated. Then, a few weeks, perhaps months later, there is often another mass shooting and we go through the exercise again.
The rampages of Monday and last week remind us that mass shootings are a unique aspect of American life, for nowhere else in the developed world do such killings happen on such a routine basis.
As we process the details of yet another mass shooting, it is easy to despair and feel that nothing will change. That is a hopeless place to be.
We aren’t naive enough to think that Monday’s shootings, or the ones tragically yet to come, will somehow change our national conversation or, miraculously, spur long-overdue action.
But, we do believe that change is possible — and necessary.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday. He then listed a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as strengthening the background check system by closing loopholes, as areas he would like to see Congress take up.
This list is ambitious and, although appropriate, it is likely unrealistic given strong Republican opposition to gun control legislation, especially in the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. House earlier this month passed two bills aimed at reducing gun violence. One bill would expand background checks to cover private gun purchases and transfers, similar to a failed 2016 Maine referendum. The other would lengthen by a week the amount of time the FBI has to complete a background check. The agency now has three days and if the check is not complete by then the gun sale can proceed. This allowed Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a historically black church in South Carolina in 2015, to obtain a gun even though he should have been barred from doing so in the background check process.
These bills are very unlikely to pass the narrowly divided Senate (even former President Donald Trump couldn’t persuade fellow Republicans to support improvements to the background check system). But that is not where the debate, and hard work, should end.
There are pieces of these bills that should be reworked to gain bipartisan support. For example, we know that the current background check system remains inadequate because millions of records are not shared by state and federal agencies, especially the Pentagon, and courts. A 2013 report by the nonprofit National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics determined that “at least 25 percent of felony convictions . . . are not available” to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System maintained by the FBI.
Although improvements have been made to the NICS system, especially as a result of a 2018 law, filling remaining data gaps and speeding up the background check process would be helpful and could prevent some unwarranted gun purchases.
Certainly such a change is not gratifying, but small change is all that seems possible in the current legislative climate in Washington and in many states. And, as we’ve seen, small changes are better than no changes at all.
In the longer term, if Americans want further restrictions on guns and gun purchases, which polls show they do, they need to elect some different lawmakers to enact these policy changes.