America
US saw 204 mass shootings in 2015: Report
By
By Arun KumarWashington, July 25
As yet another mass
shooting in the US put the spotlight back on the contentious issue of
gun control, media reports said that there have been 204 mass shootings
in as many days in 2015 so far.
Thursday night's shooting by a
white man at a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theatre showing the comedy
"Trainwreck", that left two women killed and nine injured was the third
deadly mass shooting in six weeks.
The alleged shooter John
Russell "Rusty" Houser, 59, using a handgun he legally purchased from an
Alabama pawn shop methodically shot 11 people by firing off one
10-round clip, according to Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craig.
"This was slow and methodical," as the State's Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal put it. "This was not a single burst."
The
Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced project of the anti-gun folks at
the Guns Are Cool subreddit, according to the Washington Post, had
listed 203 mass shooting events so far in 2015 before the Louisiana
movie theatre shooting.
This year there were 18 mass shootings in April, 39 in May, 41 in June, and 34 so far in July, the Post said.
The theatre shooting was Louisiana's eighth this year. There have been 10 in Ohio, 14 in California and 16 in New York.
"Will
anything change?" the Post asked and itself answered "Probably not"
noting the reaction to the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, where
a white young man shot and killed nine black worshipers at a historic
church.
It "did produce a fruitful national conversation -- not
on guns, but on the symbolism of the Confederate flag, which the shooter
adopted as a banner of his racist beliefs," the Post noted.
"The
morning after the third deadly mass shooting in six weeks, the
presidential candidates acted as though they hadn't seen the news," the
New York Times suggested looking at their reactions.
Though most
denounced the shootings and called for prayers for the victims, "none of
the presidential contenders offered policy solutions to address gun
violence", it noted describing it as a "reflection of the fact that gun
laws are politically radioactive".
Even "Jindal, who is mounting a
long-shot candidacy for the Republican nomination, completely deflected
questions on tougher gun laws, saying he would talk about 'policy and
politics' another time", Times said.
The leading Republican presidential candidates are overwhelmingly opposed to any effort to restrict access to guns, it noted.
The
Democratic hopefuls have proposed gun control measures, but they too
have been generally more focused on issues of economics, race and gender
than gun violence, according to the Times.
Although President
Barack Obama said this week that the failure to convince Congress to
pass "commonsense gun safety laws" was one of the great regrets of his
presidency, Times said "Congress is unlikely to close any of the
loopholes in federal gun laws exposed by the recent shootings".
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])