Speaking at the UN Security Council meeting on Palestine on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted that terrorist acts were ‘unlawful and unjustifiable’, whether they were carried out by ISIS, Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba or Hamas. He also underlined the vital need to protect civilian lives anywhere in the world. During his impassioned speech, Blinken apparently did not have on his mind the gun-toting ‘lone wolves’ who unleash terror in the US from time to time — be it in schools, grocery stores, restaurants or places of worship (for instance, the Wisconsin gurdwara in 2012).

One such gunman killed at least 18 people at a restaurant and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday. The suspect has been identified as Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor and a member of the US Army Reserves. Admitted to a mental health facility for two weeks earlier this year, he had reportedly been hearing voices and had threatened to ‘shoot up’ a military base. The fact that a mentally unstable American with violent tendencies was on the loose, and that too with a gun, sums up the sorry state of gun laws in that country. The US has time and again failed to protect the lives of its own civilians on its own soil.

More than 560 mass shootings — in which four or more people were shot — have occurred in the US this year so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit group. As many as 647 mass shootings took place in 2022. The occasional outrage, however, has not been potent enough to shake up the powerful American gun lobby or tighten gun laws. After two such incidents in May last year, US President Joe Biden had made a fervent plea for standing up to the gun lobby, but the Maine bloodbath shows that America has no sincere intention of setting its own house in order or learning lessons from its mistakes.
(Tribune, India)