(Recast) Commentary: Black church massacre a grim reminder of failed U.S. gun policy
Xinhua, June 20, 2015 Adjust font size:
With 18 months left in office and a hostile Congress fully controlled by Republicans who don't budge on sabotaging his agenda, U.S. President Barack Obama has made it clear with aggressive push in many domains that there is no way he would become a "lame duck" who frets over waning clout.
Yet, when it comes to dealing with rampant mass shooting in the country, which in his words "doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency", Obama almost appeared resigned in his latest speech on gun violence that all he could say was that "at some point", America would have to reckon with the ugly fact.
If not for anything else, the mass shooting at a black church on Wednesday night where nine black people were killed by a 21- year-old white man in Charleston, South Carolina, served as a grim reminder that how the authorities' inaction on gun violence could continue to hurt the U.S. public.
For a long time, mass shooting has already become a banal fact in the United States. According to shootingtracker.com, a website dedicated to tracking gun violence in the country, there were 283 shooting incidents in the United States in 2014 in which four or more people were shot. In the first five months of 2015, the number of mass shooting has already reached 119.
During his presidency, Obama is believed to have already delivered 14 nationwide speeches in the wake of mass shootings. "I 've had to make statements like this too many times," he said on Thursday following the tragic event in South Carolina.
One of the most notorious mass shootings happened in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, in which 20 kids and six adults were shot dead by a 20-year-old gunman.
The Sandy Hook school shooting, unlike the majority of mass shooting which unfortunately only stirred emotions in local communities, attracted enough attention to start a nationwide debate over the loose gun control in the country.
However, nothing happened so far to make the ownership of deadly weapons stricter.
On the contrary, 20 states have loosened gun laws since the Sandy Hook mass shooting, according to a report of Portland Press Herald.
Hamstrung by the bipartisan gridlock and powerful gun lobbying groups, the U.S. government is simply too absent-minded to hold its stance, and even the slightest changes in the country's gun policies would meet with adamant opposition.
Shortly after Wednesday night's massacre at the black church, Republican presidential hopefuls started an inter-party competition to offer their somber condolences to the victims. But none of them blamed the country's gun policy.
You would think it is a common sense to ban private ownership of semiautomatic weapons and to expand background checks on gun purchases, but unfortunately this kind of common sense just simply does not prevail in Washington. Endite