America
Killings of journalists puts gun violence in US in focus
By
Arun KumarWashington, Aug 27
As the killing of two
journalists on live TV brought the issue of gun violence in America back
into sharp focus, the White House renewed a call for Congress to pass
gun control laws.
"This is another example of gun violence that
is becoming all too common in communities large and small all across the
United States," press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday.
"There
are some common sense things that only Congress can do that we know
would have a tangible impact on reducing gun violence in this country,"
he said.
"Congress could take those steps in a way that would not infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding Americans."
A
powerful gun lobby has foiled President Barack Obama's efforts to
tighten gun laws leading him to describe it as the greatest source of
frustration during his time in office.
Even Obama's
Indian-American nominee for Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has
described gun violence as a public health issue, had to cool his heels
for more than a year before his Senate confirmation in the face of
fierce opposition from the National Rifle Association.
Murthy
told the Asian American Journalists Association convention gala in San
Francisco recently that he doesn't regret his gun-control statement
calling his difficult confirmation process a consequence of speaking
out.
Commenting on Wednesday's killings of two journalists, the
New York Times lamented "an increasingly horrific fact of life and death
in the United States that easily available guns offer troubled
Americans the power to act out their grievances in public."
Noting
"a grim reality" that the estimated 300 million guns in America owned
by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other modern
nation," it felt that "no change is likely, for all the social media
grotesquerie."
"The woeful truth underlying this latest shooting
is more mundane than alarming. There are too many guns, and too little
national will to do anything about them," it said.
In a similar vein, the Washington Post also asked: "Will America finally do something to stop our gun-fuelled carnage?"
Any
rational government would carefully regulate "highly dangerous machines
that have some legitimate uses and many illegitimate ones," it said.
"Instead,
our leaders," it said had "thwarted efforts to study the effects of
having a society saturated with firearms and generally cowered before
the lobbying might of a political fringe."
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])