America HAS a Gun Culture…..
( I have repeated thiu over and OVER)
Mass shooting’s are NOT gonna make that culture go away…
It’s actually increased gun purchases every time the media reports another incident…
And they happen just about EVERYDAY…..
The partisan divide over guns couldn’t be more stark even after the nation’s most recent mass shootings — including the killings of 19 children at a Texas elementary school.
Rather than uniting the country behind a shared vision for how to keep the public safe, the massacres have deepened the chasm between congressional lawmakers when it comes to guns, their function and their place in American culture.
Increasingly, Democrats view the Second Amendment as a malleable doctrine, subject to limits for the sake of protecting the public from violent outbursts they consider preventable. Their solution to mass shootings like Uvalde hinges on a simple premise: fewer guns in fewer hands. …
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“There’s only one difference, and that is that this country is awash in guns.”
Republicans, by contrast, are more and more likely to view gun rights as sacrosanct, and any effort to restrict them as unconstitutional. Their answer to the latest massacre is not fewer guns, but more of them, particularly in schools….
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Between the two positions, there’s been little room for compromise. And the resulting impasse has meant that thousands of mass shootings have taken place in recent years with virtually no legislative response from Congress. Some barely get a mention, let alone a bill.
It wasn’t always that way.
In 1994, following a series of mass shootings, Congress united to approve a ban on a number of semi-automatic “assault” rifles, as well as ammunition magazines deemed to be unnecessarily “high capacity.” The vote in the House was 235 to 195, with 64 Democrats voting against the package and 46 Republicans crossing the aisle to support it. It became law but the bans expired in 2004….
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Congress’s response to those tragedies marks a sharp contrast from that of other governments around the globe forced to reckon with horrific shooting massacres in recent decades. Following similar events in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, for instance, those governments united behind aggressive efforts to restrict gun sales and ownership — limits that gun reformers frequently point to as the reason for a drop in shootings in those countries afterwards.
“We’re the only society on earth where parents have to compare their DNA to the bodies of their children because they’re unrecognizable,” said [Rep.] Nadler.
Some experts have postulated that the absence of a unified response from Congress in the wake of mass shootings is at least a contributing factor to the discrepancy between the United States and other developed nations when it comes to curbing them.
“Part of that reason must be cultural, environmental, what the particular politics and environment of a particular place is,”….