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‘Why are we willing to live with this carnage?’

The massacre of 19 children in Texas once again raises the question of why public support for tighter gun laws goes unheeded in a country with a gun culture unique in the world.

By Dan Balz.

Hours after 19 children and two adults were shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States President Biden captured the range of emotions coursing through a shaken country: grief, sadness, sympathy, despair, frustration, contempt, anger, even fury.

He offered, however, barely a shred of optimism for action.

Robb Elementary now joins Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech and Columbine High School, among others, in a roster of death at educational institutions. Nowhere, it seems, are children and young people engaged in learning truly safe in America. Not in a nation where guns outnumber people, where a culture of gun violence continues to be tolerated and where episodes of carnage have become the norm.

Biden called for action by Congress to tighten gun laws, just as President Barack Obama did after the Sandy Hook shooting 10 years earlier in Newtown, Connecticut. Obama had deputised Biden, then his vice-president, to lead that effort, but a bipartisan bill was defeated in the Senate thanks to the influence of the gun lobby, led then by the National Rifle Association.

In the decade since, the country has been paralysed politically as one mass shooting after another takes place, sometimes only days apart, as was the case this month with the Buffalo and Uvalde killings.

In the years after Sandy Hook, the NRA has been hollowed out and weakened by scandal. But no matter. The gun lobby as it exists today is a citizen-grounded movement that retains a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Instead of moves to tighten gun laws, legislatures in Republican-led states, among them Texas, have acted to loosen them.

These actions further enshrine the gun culture as part of America’s heritage, all in the name of the Second Amendment, though it’s questionable that the Founding Fathers envisioned the constitutional right to bear arms serving as such a shield in the face of mass shootings of children.

Speaking after the shootings, Biden said the Second Amendment ‘‘is not absolute’’ and renewed his call for what he called ‘‘common sense’’ gun legislation, saying such a measure would not negatively affect the amendment’s rights.

Tuesday’s rampage in the small community of Uvalde ended as the second most deadly elementary school shooting in the past decade, just behind Sandy Hook, where 20 elementary students were killed, along with six adults. It came just 10 days after a racist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo that killed 10 people.

The Uvalde episode was the 27th school shooting this year and the 119th since 2018, according to Education Week, which began compiling an inventory of such horrors that year. Think about what it means that the killings of children in their schools have become common enough to need such a list.

Biden noted that in the decade since Sandy Hook, there have been 900 incidents of gunfire at schools. More than 300,000 students have been exposed to gun violence since the 1999 shooting at Columbine, in Colorado, according to a Washington Post database. No other country can claim such a shameful record.

Many factors can cause someone to go into a school filled with innocent children – or a nightclub filled with happy partyers (Orlando, 2016), or a Walmart filled with shoppers on their regular rounds (El Paso, 2019), or a church where

In Depth

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2022-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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