Ross Barkan writes:

The mass shooting in Texas that killed at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults on Thursday came on the heels of the horrific, racist slaughter in Buffalo, New York. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Joe Biden asked in a national address, sounding more like a beleaguered Democratic voter than the president of the United States. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

Biden’s plea speaks to his relative powerlessness here; the president of the United States can do many fantastic and world-historical things, but altering gun policy in a meaningful way is tragically not one of them. Every solution at hand cries out for Congress and state legislatures. For instance, to renew the assault-weapon ban that expired in 2004 — an AR15 semiautomatic rifle was wielded in the attack — would take overcoming the filibuster in the Senate. Democrats only have 50 votes there, and neither Joe Manchin nor Kyrsten Sinema, the conservative Democrats who make up two of those votes, want to move to end that historic and ultimately idiotic threshold for passing significant legislation.

Still, an assault-weapons ban will only go so far. The United States of America, the world’s wealthiest nation, is addicted to gun violence. Among affluent nations, far more die here from firearms than anywhere else. Our suicide rates are fed by easy access to handguns. It is estimated there are around 400 million guns in the United States, more than people, and we are currently in the midst of a great gun-buying boom that the pandemic accelerated. Annual domestic gun production increased from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020, according to the ATF last week. [Continue reading…]