U.S. rocked by multiple mass shootings, but major gun legislation unlikely

Washington, U.S. | Xinhua | Recent weeks have seen multiple mass shootings across the United States, but major gun control legislation is unlikely due to deep partisan and cultural divide in the country.

As of Tuesday, 13,154 Americans were killed by gun violence in 2021, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.

The archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with four or more people injured or killed, has counted 157 mass shootings in less than four months this year.

But despite the violence, experts do not foresee any new, large-scale legislation on the horizon.

The hot-button issue is one at which Republicans and Democrats are sharply at odds, as the GOP favors gun-owners’ rights, arguing that firearms protect people’s homes when the police can not arrive in time, and that gun laws will not keep people safe, but rather take away the rights of law-abiding citizens.

“Major gun legislation is unlikely because Republicans are blocking reforms that are supported by a large majority of Americans. The GOP is afraid of its base and reluctant to make any meaningful changes,” Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua.

U.S. President Joe Biden “is likely to tighten gun rules through executive actions that don’t require congressional action,” West said.

Indeed, despite Democratic control of Congress, Democrats lead by a sliver, and Republicans, who believe in the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms, are unlikely to back any Democratic-led gun bill.

While some GOP lawmakers support reforms such as universal background checks for purchases of firearms, a bitter partisan environment makes compromise unlikely.

Clay Ramsay, a researcher at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told Xinhua that there are two minor areas where some kind of legislation might pass: requiring gun owners to store their guns in locked cabinets, and “red flag” laws, which allow police to take guns away from an owner who is known to be a danger to himself and others.

Beyond these, there is a pending bill in Congress on expanding background checks, “but I think the odds for passage are about one in eight,” Ramsay said.

The Justice Department is working to write a rule to limit guns that come in kits for assembly, also called “ghost guns.”

Then there will be 30 days of public comment, “so in that phase the general debate over guns may get loud. If gun control advocates can focus on ghost guns alone and keep the argument pinned down to that, they might conceivably get a win out of it,” Ramsay said.

“Ghost guns are a nightmare for police departments, because they have no serial numbers, and in any case can be easily broken down and the parts dispersed,” Ramsay said.

The issue of gun control also underscores the cavernous gap between rural and urban Americans. Many of the former support gun owners’ rights, as hunting and fishing are a way of life in many U.S. states with large rural populations. For many in coastal cities, owning a gun is an alien concept.

The cultural divide between the two groups is vast, and many rural Americans harbor a deep distrust of what they view as Washington elites, as well as the urban Americans who vote for them. Moreover, often left out of the debate is the notion that while guns do kill, they also protect law-abiding citizens.

Gun sales are skyrocketing nationwide, as they have historically done in times when there is talk in Washington of more gun control. They also occur after a year of violent protests nationwide that destroyed the livelihoods of small business owners and those employed in those businesses.

Firearms sales in the United States in January surged by 60 percent to 4,137,480, the largest single month for gun sales since 1998, and U.S. gun sales rose 40 percent last year to 39,695,315.

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Xinhua