America is drowning in a rising tide of mass gun violence

The black matte menace of military-style or assault-style rifles, the iconic tool of destruction in countless “first-person shooter” video games, are such seductive symbols of power that some American teenagers post photos of them on their social media accounts.  

So it was with 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who is accused of purchasing not one but two AR-15 style rifles days after his birthday made it legal — and then using one of them to slaughter 19 young children and two teachers and wounding 15 others at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.  

Similarly, 18-year-old Paton Gendron, an avowed white supremacist, is accused of using an AR-15 style weapon to kill 10 people and wound three others two weeks ago at a supermarket in a predominately Black community in Buffalo, N.Y. 

These are just two of the troubled citizens united by hatred and grievance and empowered by the uniquely American freedom to acquire weapons of mass murder, granted even to the criminally inclined and mentally disturbed. Their fever dreams of retribution and infamy have become our national nightmare. 

The Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice has a database of public mass shootings. Their 2022 report on mass shootings in the United States going back a half-century indicates that nearly 98 percent of mass shooters are male. Many have experienced childhood trauma and nurse an identifiable grievance; they often study and find inspiration in past mass shooters, and they increasingly are radicalized online. They also tend to leak their plans for mass murder before acting. 

Yet, the United States does not have a monopoly on troubled young men, mental illness or internet radicalization. What it does have is a unique combination of those social ills and a civilian population awash in guns like no other developed country (120.5 firearms per 100 residents, more than double the next most-gun-owning country Yemen, a poor and tribal country in the midst of a years-long civil war.)     

As a result of that toxic combination of easy access to guns and rising societal tensions, many exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, America confronts an epidemic of gun violence not seen in a generation. In 2020, 19,384 of our fellow citizens were murdered by guns, the most in more than a half-century. That total represents a 34 percent increase just over the previous year, a nearly 50 percent increase over the past five years, and a 75 percent increase over the past 10 years. Our nation is floundering in a rising tide of gun violence 

While handguns are by far the weapon of choice in most homicides, the number and lethality of mass shootings using military-style weapons that have so shocked the nation in the past month are also on the rise. Though definitions of what constitutes a “mass shooting” and “assault weapon” differ, making data analysis of the trend line tricky, the FBI has tracked an alarming increase in what it calls “active shooter” incidents (involving an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area). There were only three such incidents in 2000, compared to 40 in 2020 and 61 last year. 

Nor is there any doubt that AR-15 military-style “assault weapons,” based on the original design of the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle, are overwhelmingly the choice of mass murderers. These light, semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines and high muzzle velocity were specifically designed to enable soldiers to kill the maximum number of enemies in close combat as quickly as possible. They are very efficient at that task. 

Military-style “assault weapons” have been used in 12 of the most notorious mass murders of the past decade. The familiar place names read like a shorthand for a profound national trauma, including attacks at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July 2012 (12 lives lost); at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012 (27 killed); at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015 (14 killed); at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 (49 killed); at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., in October 2017 (58 killed); at a rural church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November 2017 (26 killed); at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018 (17 killed); at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., in October 2018 (11 killed); at a cinema in Odessa (7 killed) and at a Walmart in El Paso (23 killed) in Texas in August 2019; and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., in March 2021 (10 killed).  

Now mass murders at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., (10 killed) and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, (21 killed) in May 2022 have been added to that rollcall of infamy. 

The problem is not that we as a nation are confused about what needs to be done to check gun violence. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway and Great Britain all had a culture of gun ownership, for instance, and all of them reacted to mass shooting incidents by restricting military-style “assault weapons,” initiating gun buybacks and tightening gun control laws. Each saw their levels of gun homicide drop precipitously. In response to the mass shootings in Texas and New York in the past month, the Canadian government introduced new gun-control legislation that would freeze the sale of handguns. In 2020, the country introduced laws banning 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms.

After an earlier spate of mass shootings in the United States that included a 1989 attack on a school in which a teacher and 32 children were shot by a gunman wielding an assault weapon, and five students were killed, President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994 an assault weapons ban that had bipartisan support from former presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Then, as now, a majority of Americans supported banning assault weapons. 

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 63 percent of the public now back such a ban, and 64 percent support banning high-capacity magazines. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans favor preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns, while an overwhelming majority of 81 percent favor subjecting private gun sales and sales at gun shows to robust background checks. 

As with so many critical issues, however, progress on gun violence has been stymied by hyper-partisanship and a politics awash in special interest money — and the 1994 assault weapons ban was allowed to sunset in 2004. 

In the decade and a half since then, the drumbeat of mass shootings has elicited virtually no response from Washington, D.C. Far too often our political leaders play to the cameras, voice platitudes about “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, and stall for time so the emotions of the moment pass. And the American public is repeatedly subjected to the kind of soul-crushing massacre of children and innocents that we witnessed this month in Texas and New York, with more such trauma surely to come. 

At what point do voters decide that we are not going to take it anymore? 

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress.