The academic year had barely begun when a gunman killed two children (ages 8 and 10) and wounded 15 others attending Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Rather than repeat the litany of compelling reasons to pass gun control laws, or make the obvious argument that a Second Amendment written in the age of the musket can hardly be applied to the era of the assault weapon, let us consider how another country responded to its own school shooting problem.
On March 14, 1996, a 43-year-old man armed with four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition entered a school in Dunblane, Scotland and murdered 16 children, ages 5 and 6, along with their teacher who tried to protect them, before killing himself.
The Conservative government under John Major took swift action. In February 1997, the Firearms (Amendment) Act banned handguns over .22 caliber, required that guns .22 caliber and under be stored in secure armories at gun clubs, banned “dum-dum” bullets, required gun clubs to register attendance and strengthened licensing requirements for all firearms.
The Labour government that came to power later that year, on May 1, 1997, amended the law to ban private citizens from owning (with few exceptions) any type of handgun. Britain had already prohibited private ownership of semi-automatic rifles in 1988.
The United Kingdom has not had a single school shooting since Dunblane. During the same period, the U.S. has had more than 420 school shootings.
After every tragedy, gun-control advocates have implored Congress to enact laws banning semi-automatic weapons, requiring background checks and a waiting period for gun purchases and imposing other reasonable restrictions on firearm ownership. They have had very little success.
For example, the 2022 Safer Communities Act enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, provided funding for states creating red flag laws and provided money for mental health care. But to get it passed, Democrats had to strip out tougher measures such as universal background checks and a national “red flag law.”
The act did nothing to deter or inhibit the Minneapolis shooter.
The 1994 assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004 and has not been renewed. Congress has prohibited the Justice Department maintaining a national registry of most firearms.
Unlike their British counterparts, conservative American lawmakers have avoided the gun control issue by deflecting blame for school shootings.
Following the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre called for armed guards in schools.
Even though the perpetrator used an AR-15 as well as handguns to kill 20 children and six adults, Congress would not renew the assault weapon ban.
An armed sheriff’s deputy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, failed to confront, let alone stop a gunman entering the school and murdering 17 students and staff in 2018.
Heavily armed police officers in Uvalde, Texas waited outside the classroom while a gunman systematically slaughtered 19 students and two teachers.
Rather than admit that restricting access to firearms is the only thing that will work, Republicans continue to make the argument that the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
If professional guards aren’t enough, why not arm teachers and staff? That is exactly what a Florida panel investigating the Parkland shooting recommended. However, a survey conducted immediately following the tragedy found that 73 percent of teachers did not want to be armed.
Law enforcement professionals and educators who have served in the military are among the most vocal critics of arming teachers. They note that the chances of an accidental discharge or other mishap or a student getting hold of the weapon are far greater than the odds of a teacher stopping an active shooter.
Securing school buildings is another favorite deflection argument of gun rights advocates. Following the Uvalde massacre Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared that we must “harden our schools” to solve the problem.
“We need serious funding to upgrade our schools to install bulletproof doors and locking classroom doors,” Cruz insisted. He also argued that schools should have only one entrance.
A few days after the massacre, Cruz spoke at the NRA convention in Houston, defending the Second Amendment.
Completely hardening a school building is almost impossible. You can lock children in during classes, but twice a day they must enter and leave the building. Restricting access to only one door will create congestion at that entrance.
A group of kids lined up to enter their school would be an easy target, so would children playing outside during recess.
Finally, there is the quintessential deflection argument trotted out after every tragedy: mental health care. “If only we took better care of the mentally ill, school shootings wouldn’t happen so often,” the argument goes.
“We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America,” Vice President JD Vance declared after the Minneapolis shooting.”
He said nothing about the pandemic of gun violence plaguing the country.
“We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence,” Vance continued, seeming to reference a dubious link between psychotropic drugs and mass shootings.
This conclusion overlooks the obvious fact that all countries have mentally ill citizens, but not all countries have so many school shootings.
A 2023 study of mental illness and gun violence in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia revealed that although the three countries have comparable rates of mental illness, the U.S. has a gun-death rate 10 times that of Australia and 40 times that of the U.K.
We do need better mental health care, just as we need better school security, but providing these things won’t stop the killing. There will always be disturbed people, and as long as they have easy access to firearms, the massacres will continue.
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat .”
