IF there is one piece of news that emerges at regular intervals from the US, it is about gun violence.

It is a sobering thought then that the carnage at an outdoor country music festival on Sunday in Las Vegas may not have been so shocking but for the huge number of casualties. Otherwise, it would have been just another one of the six mass shootings — defined as those with at least four casualties — that occurred in the US this past week alone.

But in what turned out to be the deadliest such incident in modern US history, at least 58 people died and over 500 were injured when Stephen Paddock, from his vantage point on the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel, unloaded his weapons into the crowd below. The firing only ended with Paddock’s suicide, just as police stormed the hotel suite where he was holed up.

There they discovered an arsenal of 23 assault rifles, of which a dozen were fitted with a device that enables semi-automatics to discharge rapid fire rounds like automatics.

While Paddock’s motives may be unclear thus far, the incident has revived the debate in the US about its lax gun laws that allow unstable and violent individuals access to deadly weapons, often with terrible consequences.

Between 2001 and 2010, there were over 400,000 gun deaths in the US, of which more than 153,000 were homicides. The solution, although not black-and-white, points towards strengthening regulations on the purchase of firearms, a position that a majority of Americans support.

However, efforts to bring about even common-sense restrictions fail repeatedly because they come up against one of the most powerful interest groups in the country: the National Rifle Association.

With its enormous resources that it pours into the election campaigns of many politicians, the NRA exerts an outsize influence over Congress. Therefore, when demands are made for gun legislation to be tightened, usually in the aftermath of a mass murder, most lawmakers obfuscate the issue with tropes about the constitutionally protected right to bear arms or the fallacious argument that it is people, not guns, that kill.

Significantly, even when mass murderers are driven by extremist motives, the response centres around the politics of religious extremism and its international dimensions while the clear and present danger is neatly sidestepped. The stonewalling on gun laws is as much, if not more, about politics.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2017