The Monterey Park massacre in Los Angeles has once again brought focus back on gun control in the US

The 72-year-old man allegedly guilty of the Los Angeles mass shooting has died, but the horrible incident has once again brought the debate over gun control into focus. Huu Can Tran murdered 10 people and wounded at least 10 more. He gunned down people who were celebrating at a Chinese Lunar New Year party at Monterey Park. Police followed him and found him in a van. Surrounded by cops, he apparently shot himself. The Monterey Park shooting is one of the many that have occurred in different parts of the United States. In May last year, a shooter in Texas killed 21 people at an elementary school. The US seems to be the only nation in the world that witnesses such mindless violence on a regular basis. Even the most dangerous places on earth — e.g., Afghanistan and Somalia — don’t have incidents where mad persons go out slaughtering people, often children, for no rhyme or reason. Yes, a lot of massacres are carried out by jihadists and other violent groups, but that’s done for a purpose. The massacres in the US, however, defy reason; mostly the culprits are psychopaths. But then there are psychopaths in all countries, so why do they end up carrying out mass murders, using guns, only in the US—the most advanced country in the world where law-enforcement agencies are equipped with the best weapons and state-of-the-art devices to fight crime?

This is primarily because the laws controlling guns in the US are quite lax, as compared to the ones in other countries. Importantly, the US Constitution, by way of the Second Amendment (1791) says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For much of its early history, the Second Amendment went largely unscrutinized by the Supreme Court, says the website of the US Congress (the American parliament). The few nineteenth century cases implicating the Second Amendment established for a time that the Amendment was a bar to federal, but not state, government action, and the Court’s only significant Second Amendment decision in the twentieth century seemed to suggest that the right protected under the Amendment was tied only to state militia use of certain types of firearms, it added. Effective control over gun ownership is problematic because of the sharp differences between the conservatives and liberals, represented by the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively. For more conservative of the Republicans, the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, so the party is unwilling to compromise on the subject. The Democrats, on the other hand, are increasingly getting influenced by Leftists whose agenda includes such abominations as defunding the police and critical race theory. The need of the hour is the middle ground where both parties can thrash out a plan to curb, if not eliminate, the dangers posed by the extant gun laws.