“Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
Too often, as he did Thursday following the mass shooting that claimed nine innocent lives in Roseburg, Oregon, President Barack Obama has had to offer condolences and prayers for communities, including Charleston, South Carolina; our own Marysville; Newtown, Connecticut; and others stretching back to just months after his first inauguration.
But the president also expressed frustration over the nation’s inability to take significant action to address gun violence by passing commonsense gun-safety laws.
“Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”
Mass shootings and gun violence in general are now treated as if they are natural disasters, events where we pick up the pieces afterward, treat the wounded, mourn the dead and comfort the families, but can do nothing in advance to prevent. We drill school children to take shelter beneath their classroom desks for earthquakes and in closets for gunmen.
Although it can seem as if gun deaths in the U.S. are on the increase, gun deaths have decreased since the mid-’90s, but have leveled off at about 33,000 a year since 2010. That’s not a number to celebrate. As fatalities from auto accidents continue to drop — 33,516 in 2012 — gun fatalities, including suicides, are this year expected to surpass those from auto accidents. The numbers are particularly frightening when young people are considered, as noted in a 2014 study by the Center for American Progress. Using current trends it found the number of gun deaths among teenagers between 14 and 18 would number 1,700 this year and were not projected to decline.
Yet lawmakers in the Legislature and in Congress block the simplest of measures.
In July, a U.S. House committee rejected an amendment that would have allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the underlying causes of gun violence.
Each of the past three legislative sessions, Rep. Ruth Kagi, D-Shoreline, has proposed legislation that would require safe storage of firearms in homes with children, making it a crime to leave an unsecured gun where a child under 16 could have access to it. Legislators could not find the courage to move Kagi’s bill forward even after the Marysville Pilchuck High School shootings, in which the 15-year-old gunman, Jaylen Fryberg, used a gun that belonged to his father to kill four classmates and himself. (Jaylen’s father, Raymond Fryberg, recently was convicted in federal court, not for providing the gun his son used in the shooting, but for unlawful possession of firearms.)
Where the courage lies for commonsense gun-safety laws is with the people. It was a citizen’s initiative, I-594 with 59 percent approval, that last year closed loopholes for firearm background checks in the state.
Just days after last October’s shootings at Marysville Pilchuck, two parents who lost children in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, came to Snohomish County as part of their outreach with Sandy Hook Promise, which has promoted efforts to end gun violence. Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was among the 20 children and six adults who died in the 2012 massacre, counseled Marysville, the Tulalip Tribes and the greater Snohomish County community to find a way “to stand on top of your tragedy, rather than be mired in it.”
Barden told Herald Columnist Julie Muhlstein that he was angry that Sandy Hook had not been enough to bring more action, that the shootings were continuing.
“We can do something about it, or not,” he said.
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