Twenty-five-year-old former bank employee Connor Sturgeon entered, on Monday, a downtown bank in Louisville (KY), shot dead five people and wounded eight, all while videostreaming the entire event until he was picked off by police.
One of the victims, a vice-president at the bank, was a close friend of Kentucky governor Andy Beshear.
This marked the 146th documented mass shooting in the U.S. so far in 2023, and renewed calls to place restrictions on firearm availability (in particular the AR-15 style rifle used to commit this atrocity, which renders its victims virtually unrecognizable).
Yet, even calls to ban only this specific weapon—in addition to common sense measures like background checks, waiting periods, and “red flag” laws–have been met with fierce resistance.
These atrocities are becoming commonplace on an almost daily basis, but continue to fall upon deaf ears in a nation where gun ownership outnumbers the actual population. Contrast the U.S. rate of firearm ownership per 100 inhabitants (121:100) with that of Morocco’s (4.8 per 100), and the implications are astounding. The U.S. also has the highest firearm homicide rate of all “developed” nations—4.1 deaths per 100,000 people—while Morocco’s rate is 0.46 per 100, a nearly nine-fold differential.
America’s gun culture is unique, as it is one of only three nations in which the right to private gun ownership is enshrined in its constitution, with gun ownership rates of the other two countries (Mexico and Guatemala) being a tenth that of the U.S.
In this nation where guns outnumber people, various conservative lobbying groups such as the National Rifle Association, and a citizenry with antiquated, cherry-picked, morbidly twisted, self-serving views and gross misinterpretations as to the context in which the architects of their constitution actually intended to provide for private gun ownership–at a time when American colonists were fighting England for their independence—have stymied a multitude of legislation that would easily prevent guns from reaching the hands of criminals and psychopaths.
The Boston-based English language Chinese newspaper Sampan—reporting on April 7—recently interviewed a Moroccan citizen who had this to say about his perspective on contemporary life in the U.S.:
“I have been living in the U.S. for more than twenty years. I have never felt threatened for my life or the lives of my children because shootings usually happened in places they were bound to happen. However, since 2016, life has changed dramatically in America. Random shooting and mass killing has become more common.”