Three weeks ago, I asked President Trump why he’d done nothing to stop another mass shooting after the recent horrendous massacre in Las Vegas.
‘He was a sicko,’ he replied, ‘I mean that’s the big problem – they’re sick people.’
Ah yes, that’s the BIG problem with the US culture of gun violence obviously – mental illness, not guns.
In Davos I asked President Trump why he’d done nothing to stop another mass shooting after the horrendous massacre in Las Vegas. ‘He was a sicko,’ he replied, ‘I mean that’s the big problem – they’re sick people’
‘The definition of insanity,’ Albert Einstein once said, ‘is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’
In the case of America’s attitude to mass shootings, the definition of insanity is different: the world’s richest, most powerful country does absolutely nothing over and over again, and nobody expects different results.
Five years ago, a deranged, angry young 20-year-old man used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and high capacity bullet magazines to murder 26 people including 20 kids at a school in Sandy Hook, Conneticut.
Yesterday, a deranged, angry young 19-year-old man used an AR-15 and high capacity magazines to murder at least 17 people including many kids at a school in Parkland, Florida.
This deranged, angry young 19-year-old man used an AR-15 and high capacity magazines to murder 17 children and teachers at a school in Parkland, Florida
As the US slips once more into its familiar Groundhog Day post-gun-massacre pattern of feigned shock, hand-wringing thoughts and prayers, insincere cable news blather, and pathetic inaction, I’d like to explore President Trump’s ‘sicko’ premise.
My eldest son was once refused an alcohol-free beer at a Malibu restaurant.
At the time, he was 21 years old, 6ft 1in tall, with long hair and a full beard.
Remember when a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot dead this instructor, Charles Vacca, at a range in while firing an Uzi, and it was all entirely legal?
The reason he was given was that he had no I.D. on him and ‘non-alcoholic’ beer actually still contains a tiny amount (under 0.5%) of alcohol in it.
A week later, a tiny, waif-like 9-year-old girl accidentally shot dead an instructor at a “Bullets and Burgers” gun range in Arizona.
She had fired – and lost control of – an UZI sub-machine gun, one of the most dangerous high-powered weapons in the world.
This was all entirely legal.
That’s ‘sicko’, right?
I mean, no rational human being could possibly think that putting such a hideous killing machine in the hands of a little girl is anything other than complete madness?
Wrong.
A lot of Americans, tens of millions of them in fact, think that’s perfectly OK.
And they see no contradiction with my son being declined an alcohol-free beer.
Why?
Because he had no unalienable constitutional right to an alcohol-free beer, whereas the little girl had an unalienable constitutional right to bear arms.
Looking at the images from Parkland yesterday, I thought of how a grown man can’t get a beer without ID in the US, yet a child can fire an Uzi and a teenage killer could own an AR-15
I thought of this after yesterday’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
The shooter, former student Nikolas Cruz, was too young to be allowed to buy a beer in a state that like many in the US has ‘zero tolerance alcohol laws’.
But he was legally able to buy a semi-automatic military style rifle.
That’s ‘sicko’, right?
Well, I think it is. But again, tens of millions of Americans have no problem with it.
Cruz apparently passed a background check when purchasing his gun.
This despite the fact he had been treated for ‘mental issues’, expelled from the school he attacked (among many concerning acts of behaviour, he sold knives out of his lunchbox and was found with bullets in his backpack), banned from returning to the school after threatening teachers, and accused of abusing a girlfriend.
Oh, and despite the fact he had posted endless photos of himself on social media brandishing guns and regularly threatening to shoot people including students at the school.
His Instagram account included an image of a gun’s holographic laser sight pointed at a neighbourhood street. A second showed at least six rifles and handguns laid out on a bed with the caption ‘arsenal’. Another photo showed a box of bullets with the caption ‘cost me $30’.
The social media clues: His Instagram included an image of a gun’s holographic laser sight pointed at a neighbourhood street. This image showed at least six rifles and handguns laid out on a bed with the caption ‘arsenal’
Another photo showed a box of bullets with the caption ‘cost me $30’
Cruz also enjoyed posting photos of animals he had gruesomely killed.
Short of announcing live on TV that he was about to do what he did, Cruz couldn’t have made his nefarious intentions any clearer.
He was a monster waiting to explode, and all who knew him were very aware of exactly where he might execute that explosion.
‘I think everyone in the school had it in the back of their mind that if anyone was going to do it, it was most likely gonna be him,’ said student Dakota Mutchler.
The teachers all knew, which is why an email was sent out warning them all to keep an eye out for Cruz after he was expelled, especially if he had a backpack with him.
And yet whilst it was deemed too dangerous for Cruz to buy a beer, it was deemed perfectly sensible to let him buy an AR-15.
I’d say that’s pretty damn ‘sicko’- wouldn’t you?
When I interviewed President Trump, in Davos at the World Economic Forum, I told him: ‘Only eight people were killed in America last year by Islamist terrorism. By comparison, domestic gun violence killed at least 32,000. Two of the worst mass shootings in American history have now happened on your watch in Las Vegas and at a church in Texas. People will be saying, you’re very tough on security, you want to keep Americans safe, but if you don’t do anything about gun violence at all that seems an irrational position for somebody who wants to keep Americans safe?’
Trump then tried to deflect my question by talking about another country.
‘Take a look at Paris,’ he said, ‘where you have very tough guns controls. Take a look at that terrible slaughter where so many people were killed…by thugs with guns. So the bad guys have the guns and if you would have had somebody with a gun when they walked in so you could have bullets going in the other direction, you wouldn’t have hundreds of people killed.’
This, of course, is the same warped logic spewed so often by Trump’s paymasters at the NRA (before news of the shooting broke, the NRA retweeted a gun manufacturer’s photo of two guns on a heart and the caption ‘Get your significant other something they’ll appreciate this Valentine’s Day’) only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. So the only answer to mass shootings is for everyone else to be armed too.
What Trump didn’t say is that 130 people were killed in Paris that night; a terrible toll, but around a quarter of the number of people killed by guns in America EVERY WEEK.
When I pointed out that countries like Britain, which also has very tough gun laws, average just 32 gun deaths a year, he deflected again: ‘But you have a lot of terrorism.’
Yes, it’s true Britain had a number of Islamist terror attacks in 2017.
But the total death total was smaller (35) than the number murdered by guns in America EVERY DAY.
I asked Trump specifically why he had done nothing to stop even bump stocks (an attachment that allows semi-automatic guns to fire like fully automatic guns) being sold, after it emerged the Vegas shooter had converted a dozen AR-15s by using them.
I asked Trump about the Las Vegas shooter’s massive arsenal. ‘If he didn’t have a gun, he would have had a bomb… he would have had 55 bombs’
‘If he didn’t have a gun, he would have had a bomb, or would have something else,’ the President answered.
‘But he had 55 guns,’ I said.
‘The point is, he would have had 55 bombs,’ said President Trump, as if somehow it is as easy to purchase 55 bombs in America, where they are strictly illegal.
‘Why can’t you make it more difficult for him?’ I persisted.
(Current US gun laws are so lax even terror suspects on the no-fly list are allowed to buy firearms)
Trump sighed. ‘I’m a Second Amendment person. I think you need it (guns) for security. You’ve had so many attacks where there was only a bad person’s gun – going in this direction and if they had bullets going in the opposite direction, you would have saved a lot of lives.’
Then he repeated: ‘So I get what you’re saying but I believe in the Second Amendment.’
In other words, he intends to do absolutely nothing to stop these massacres happening again.
Well, I’m sorry Mr President, but this just isn’t acceptable.
You can’t pretend to be tough on security but turn a blind eye when yet another US school (there have been over 280 school shootings since Sandy Hook) is turned into a human slaughterhouse.
Mr President, you can’t pretend to be tough on security but turn a blind eye when yet another US school (there have been over 280 school shootings since Sandy Hook) is turned into a human slaughterhouse. It’s spineless and cowardly
It’s spineless and cowardly, and you know it.
Imagine your son Barron had been in that school yesterday – and then decide what is the right thing to do.
‘No child, teacher or anyone else should feel unsafe in an American school,’ you tweeted yesterday.
Yet the tragic truth is no child, teacher or anyone else now feels SAFE in an American school.
The Florida attack was the ninth biggest gun atrocity in American history.
That means three of the country’s worst ever mass shootings have now happened on your watch – in just five months.
Yet one of the only things you’ve done about guns as President was to roll back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illness to get guns.
That’s ‘sicko’, Mr President.
And anyone who thinks the only answer to this carnage is even more guns is also ‘sicko’.