Exactly one day after the first anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., Donald Trump declared a national emergency.
Since the Parkland shooting, almost 1,200 children have fallen to gun violence.
2018 holds the record for school gun violence.
That sounds like an emergency.
But Trump felt the real national emergency (with which he’s been teasing the mainstream media for a month) lies over his failure to secure five billion dollars of taxpayer money for a wall along the southern US border with Mexico.
Hours later, there was another mass shooting.
At least six people were killed, and eleven, including five police officers, were wounded Friday in a shooting at the Henry Pratt Co. warehouse in Aurora, Ill., 40 miles west of Chicago.
45-year-old Gary Martin, a Henry Pratt employee, is the now-deceased gunman.
Aurora mayor, Richard Irvin, said at a press conference:
“It’s a shame that mass shootings like this have become commonplace. We as a society cannot allow these horrific acts to become commonplace.”
But they have.
Martin possessed an illegal handgun he never should have been able to obtain because of six prior arrests for domestic violence and aggravated assault.
There have 39 categorical shootings so far this year, according to Gun Violence Archive.
Although statistically mass shootings constitute a fraction of America’s more than 32,000 firearm deaths every year, the U.S. outpaces other developed countries in gun deaths.
According to United Nations (UN) data, the U.S. experienced 29.7 firearm homicides per 1 million people in 2012; Switzerland experienced 7.7 million; Canada, 5.1 million; and Germany, 1.9 million.
The U.S. comprises about 4.4 percent of the global population but has 42 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Empirical research proves settings where more guns are present increases the likelihood gun violence will ensue.
Yet apparently a wall is a national emergency.
MSNBC’s John Heilemann said on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House:
“I’m looking at the statistics, 323 in 2018. 323 mass shootings in 2018, nearly one a day in America. I don’t know what definitions—I don’t know how to define an emergency, but I’ll tell you that if you listen to the experts who talk about what’s happening on the southern border and look at the number of mass shootings in America, before you go to solutions or anything else, I think we can all look around and say this is an emergency…An emergency is guns. An emergency is climate change. An emergency is the state of our schools. An emergency is health care in America. An emergency is the opioid crisis…This is the kind of thing when you think about this and think about what the president did today basically admitting what he was doing was a cheap, empty, meaningless political ploy, it makes your stomach churn.“
Trump admitted, after all, he “didn’t have to” declare a national emergency.
That should say everything right there.
Image credit: Pixabay
