The reasons for the violence are familiar and incontrovertible. The United States has many more guns than citizens, about 400 million firearms, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, and 331 million people.
From Opinion: The Texas School Shooting
Commentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
For more than a decade now, semiautomatic handguns, bought for personal protection, outsell rifles, which have been typically used in hunting.
And the coronavirus pandemic stirred an even greater gun-buying craze. Annual domestic gun production increased from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020, according to a report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A vast majority of those firearms stayed in the United States.
The toll of the violence, especially on children, has only grown. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.
Last year, more than 1,500 children and teenagers younger than 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings, compared with about 1,380 in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database tracking gun deaths.
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Biden said on Tuesday night after returning from a trip to Asia. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a young legislator when the children were killed in Sandy Hook, exhorted his fellow senators to action on Tuesday. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” he said on the Senate floor.
These were questions with familiar answers: not much of anything on the federal level. Republicans, often appealing to the Second Amendment, have blocked efforts to add stiffer background checks for gun purchasers every time another major mass shooting jostles the nation’s conscience. Still, within hours of the shooting in Uvalde, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, moved to clear the way to force votes in the coming days on legislation that would strengthen background checks.
The Uvalde gunman, who the Texas governor said had no known mental health problems, bought two semiautomatic rifles within the past week, shortly after turning 18, a state police official said. He was killed by law enforcement at the scene.
