If gun violence is claiming countless lives in the US, social prejudices are damaging India’s secular fabric
Since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootout in Connecticut, there have been at least 142 school shootings, or approximately one shooting a week in the United States, including the incident at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon, on the opposite coast, on the morning of October 1, in which there were 10 fatalities, including the gunman.
Motives still remain unclear, though the gunman reportedly wrote in a blog attributed to him that “seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight”, just about a month back on August 31. The police recovered two handguns and body armour after the incident.
This author is not quite sure whether the Americans would find it ironical that he was living in the nearby community of Winchester, probably named after the iconic repeater-rifle of that name made famous in the 1800s during the days of the Wild West!
Incidentally, the first recorded school shooting in the United States was on July 26, 1764, when American-Indian tribesmen entered a school in the State of Pennsylvania and killed the teacher and 10 students, undoubtedly an act of desperation against an occupation force.
But ever since, statistics of shooting incidents do not pleasant reading make. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation report A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United StatesBetween 2000 and 2013, states that there were 160 incidents during that period which resulted in 486 fatalities and 557 wounded. Thankfully, of these 160 odd incidents only six were by women, if that has any significance. While these figures pertain to mass shootings they do not explain the extent of the problem of gun violence, which by one account, resulted in 1,50,000 deaths within the same time period.
Be that it may, but in all of this the greater tragedy is not in that these incidents have occurred on such a routine basis, but in the fact that quite a few of these incidents would never have happened if gun control laws in the US were not so lax, thanks to the Second Amendment to their Constitution that unequivocally states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed” — something that the Conservative party swears by.
That citizens of an advanced country, as the United States, are unwilling and unable to understand the impact of gun laws in controlling violence is incomprehensible given the wealth of evidence available in public forums. For example, in Australia stringent gun laws, including a buy-back of weapons, was introduced in 1996 after a mentally disturbed young man killed 35 and wounded 18.
Since then only 30 cases of homicide due to gun violence have occurred till date. That the all-powerful National Rifle Association in Washington, DC, recently trashed the Australian process clearly illustrates how history holds us hostage.
lest we wonder how all this concerns us in India, it may be worth remembering that we have our demons too. The recent mob lynching at Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, over rumours that a Muslim man had kept bef at home, was just as horrendous in itself. But what is worse is the open advocacy of the lynch mob by some loudmouths, who should have known better, referring to what is evidently a cold-blooded murder as an “unfortunate accident”.
The fact of the matter is that we are a country in which over 200 million citizens are not bound by any religious convention from eating beef, just as another billion are not stopped from eating pork, if they care too.
Is 21st century India going to be about what an individual eatsIJ Shouldn’t the country, instead, be thinking about the fact that more than half the population goes to sleep on an empty stomachIJ Isn’t that what why we voted our leaders to powerIJ
(The author is a military veteran and a consultant with the Observer Research Foundation)