December 1, 2021: Young people at a Michigan high school scrambled to block classroom doors with desks and climbed out of windows to save their lives during a shooting that left three dead and eight others injured. The suspected gunner? A 15-year-old sophomore.
Most tragic, though, is the fact that the crime is not the first of its kind and by no means will be the last. It will fade away from the front pages in a hurry. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution gives Americans the right to bear arms, leading to about a third of adults in the country being reported to have personally owned a gun.
Gun violence ranks atop of Americans’ general concern, along side affordability of healthcare, illegal immigration and even the COVID-19 pandemic. International and domestic terrorism is far lower in the list of public worries. Concern about economic inequality and racism are also no where near gun-related anxiety.
Yet as the right to possess firearms is stipulated in the Constitution and gun lobbying is huge, there is little anyone opposed to the virtually free-for-all gun ownership can do.
In a survey conducted in the middle of this year, four in ten US adults lived in a household with a gun. About 30% of that admitted they were the owners themselves. The scary numbers seem to be continually rising as well, as “background checks” during a specific time in 2020 are 20% more than the same period in the previous year.
Some said the Michigan suspect had been bullied. It was not immediately clear if he was targeting anyone with the semiautomatic handgun he had taken to school Tuesday.
Daily update by Tulsathit Taptim
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