‘We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by,’ said President Trump yesterday after the Las Vegas massacre.
Will we, Mr President?
With the greatest of respect, I find that promise highly unlikely given your craven support for, and from, the NRA.
When later specifically asked by reporters aboard Air Force One whether he was even open to a discussion about gun control, Trump was less equivocal: ‘At some point perhaps that will come. That’s not today.’
Not today?
Why not today?
In fact, has there ever been a BETTER day to discuss gun control?
‘We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by,’ said President Trump yesterday. Will we, Mr President? I find that promise unlikely given your craven support for, and from, the NRA. If we can’t discuss it when nearly 600 people are shot by one man armed with guns he bought legally – then when CAN we?
If we can’t discuss it when nearly 600 people are shot by one man armed with 23 guns he apparently bought legally – then when CAN we discuss it exactly?
The sickening truth, of course, is that the NRA doesn’t ever want us to discuss gun control, and they certainly don’t want THEIR President discussing it.
The White House knows this, which is why a spokesman said: ‘Let’s gather the facts before we make sweeping policy arguments for curtailing the Second Amendment.’
Gather what facts?
We know what happened:
A white 64-year-old American man named Stephen Paddock opened fire on 22,000 people from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Vegas strip.
He fired from a range of legally acquired semi-automatic rifles he had sneaked into his room over several days.
We know what happened. A white American man opened fire on 22,000 people from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Vegas strip with a range of legally acquired semi-automatic rifles he had sneaked into his room over several days
Twelve of those rifles were converted to illegal automatic weapons by use of ‘bump fire stock’, a cheap legal add-on to guns that makes them fire in a far more rapid manner.
A total of 58 people were murdered, and another 527 wounded.
This made it the biggest mass shooting in modern American history, dwarfing anything we’ve seen before in terms of scale and horror.
If Paddock hadn’t, as is believed, run out of ammunition, he would presumably have carried on shooting until police eventually took him out and perhaps slaughtered another few hundred or even thousand people.
The only ‘fact’ we don’t know yet is why he did it.
The facts seem pretty clear. The only thing not clear is why Stephen Paddock did it
But the rest of the facts seem pretty bloody clear to me.
So forgive me, Mr President, but I think this is absolutely the right moment to be discussing this.
Trump and I have debated guns on numerous occasions.
The last time was in March, 2016, during an interview for ITV.
It was four months after the multiple terror attacks in Paris at a sports stadium, music venue and several bars and restaurants, that killed 130 people.
‘You are firmly in favour of Second Amendment rights,’ I told Trump, ‘the right to bear arms. I have obviously had a position against that but I’m not an American citizen. If you were President of the United States, what would you do to try and reduce the level of gun violence in America, which we both, I’m sure, would admit is completely unacceptable?’
‘It’s really one of the things on which we disagree and are very much on opposite sides,’ Trump replied. ‘I will say this though; Paris has among the strictest gun laws in world. You had these thugs going in there shooting people and there wasn’t another gun in the room, they had all the guns. If you had a few people standing on the other side of that room that had guns to their waist or guns wrapped around their ankle it wouldn’t have been the same thing, Piers. One, it might not of happened at all because people would have said there are guns in there I’m not going to go there, and two, if it did happen, at least you’d have bullets going the opposite direction.’
Trump added: ‘That’s a hard one for you to debate and I don’t want to debate it with you because I think it’s unfair.’
I don’t find it a hard one to debate at all.
‘America has more guns than any other country and more gun violence,’ I retorted. ‘We have 35 gun deaths a year in Britain, America has 85 a day. So there appears to be a correlation between volume of guns in society and the amount of gun violence. I come back to my question: If you were President, what would do to reduce the level of gun violence in America?’
‘OK,’ Trump replied. ‘There is a tremendous mental health problem in the United States and remember, it’s the person that pulls the trigger, it’s not the trigger that pulls itself. If you look at some of the school shootings, the movie shootings, these were mentally ill people that should have been institutionalised. That is one of the big factors.’
This to-and-fro with Trump revealed the three basic tenets about guns so beloved by the NRA and so prevalent among tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans:
1) If you have guns, other people are less likely to use them against you.
2) If someone fires a gun, it is safer if everyone else in the vicinity has guns to fire back – and uses them.
3) Guns aren’t the problem, crazy people are the problem.
But the massacre in Las Vegas utterly destroys those arguments, doesn’t it?
Dozens of people in the area that night had guns, from armed police officers and security guards to members of the public who are legally allowed to open-carry guns in Nevada. None of them was able to stop Paddock because how do you stop a guy firing rifles down on a crowd from the 32nd floor of a hotel?
Moreover, if everyone in that audience had been armed with their own guns and used them, can you even begin to imagine the carnage that would have erupted? It was 11pm, it was dark, it was teeming with people.
Imagine 22,000 guns going off at the same time, nobody sure where to even fire.. the death toll would have been a hundred times as high.
And yes, it’s true that most people who commit this kind of mass shooting are mentally ill. How could they not be? But we have a lot of mentally ill people in Britain, as does every country. The difference is that those people can’t legally get their hands on semi-automatic weapons, so they can’t execute their evil intent to anything on this scale.
So of course, the real problem IS the gun.
It is absolutely incredible to me that Stephen Paddock was able to build up a legal arsenal of 47 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and all the bump fire stock he needed to turn his rifles into machine guns.
The real problem IS the gun. Stephen Paddock was able to build up a legal arsenal of 47 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and all the bump fire stock he needed to turn his rifles into machine guns. He bought over 30 of the guns this year alone – some here, at a ‘Guns & Guitars’ shop in Mesquite
It was reported today that he bought over 30 of the guns this year alone. Yet if you buy no more than two at a time, there is no federal limit on the number you can amass.
This enabled Paddock to turn himself into Rambo without a single red flag ever being signalled to the numerous gun stores he visited.
As America goes through its usual meaningless Groundhog Day style hand-wringing over this latest mass shooting, I want to offer some concrete proposals to at least try to stop these appalling incidents happening again.
First, I accept it’s not practical to ban all guns in America, there are simply too many of them. But nobody has ever given me a sensible reason why a civilian should own a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15 that can fire up to 40-50 bullets a minute. I refuse to believe the Founding Fathers would have ever countenanced civilians owning guns like this. That is not what the 2nd Amendment was ever about.
These rifles are the preferred weapon of choice for many mass shooters because they’re light, easy-to-use and can be easily adapted into machine guns. So ban them. That would still leave Americans with over 2000 different varieties of gun to own. Yes, 2000.
BAN all bump stock. Its sole purpose is to turn legal guns into illegal ones. How does that make any sense? This file photo shows a ‘bump’ stock next to a disassembled .22-caliber rifle, in effect it converts semiautomatic firearms into fully automatic ones
Second, ban all bump fire stock too. Its sole purpose is to turn legal guns into illegal ones. How does that make any sense?
Third, restrict all gun magazines and clips to a maximum of ten bullets. No civilian ever needs more than that for self-protection or hunting. Make it impossible for these mass shooters to fire so many bullets so fast.
Fourth, restrict the number of guns any civilian can own to five. Nobody, surely, needs more than that? And restrict ammunition ownership too, to prevent such vast stockpiles being created.
I have some concrete proposals – including two restricting all gun magazines and clips to a maximum of ten bullets and restrict the number of guns any civilian can own to five. And nobody has ever given me a sensible reason why a civilian should own a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15 that can fire up to 40-50 bullets a minute
Fifth, introduce universal background checks on ALL gun purchases, and make them detailed. Why would anyone want a criminal or mentally ill person to buy a gun? Yet 40% of all guns traded at US gun fares are done so with no checks at all. It’s utter madness. Most polls say 90% of Americans support universal background checks, so this should not even be contentious.
Sixth, tackle America’s mental health problem head on by dramatically reducing the ridiculous over-medication of the population. Paddock was apparently put on Valium for anxiety a few months ago. Did that play a part in sending him over the edge? Who knows…but I do know it’s almost impossible to find ANY American now who isn’t needlessly popping pills for some reason. That is worsening, not improving mental health.
Tackle the mental health problem in America. Require universal background checks. This massacre happened on YOUR watch Mr. President
None of these suggestions is an infringement of an American’s rights to bear arms. You can still have a gun if you want one.
But what they will infringe is a person’s ability to commit mass murder with the ease that Paddock was able to do so.
After Vegas, new gun control laws must not just be discussed, they must be strengthened.
This is YOUR call, President Trump. This happened on YOUR watch.
Silence, apathy and kicking this can down the road are not an option.
Cowardice in the face of the NRA’s disgusting and ruthlessly commercial bullyboy tactics is not an option.
Waiting for the next Stephen Paddock to open fire on a crowd of Americans is not an option.
It’s time to put the rights of your fellow citizens not to be shot dead over the rights of men like Paddock to buy 47 guns and annihilate a crowd of country music fans.