After Uvalde, a British reporter’s question — why does America have so many mass...
Gun violence is not uniquely American. El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and Venezuela have significantlycompared to the U.S., largely due to gangs, drug trafficking and civil unrest. Mass shootings are also not uniquely American. Belgium, Finland, France and Germany have all experienced a mass shooting in the past few decades.
What’s left the whole world flummoxed is how often these attacks occur in the United States — and how little has been done to address the issue. Just since Uvalde, there have been at leastPresident Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, speaking to Stanford students from his war-torn nation just days after the shooting,
: “We are living in those terrible times when American people express their condolences because of the death of the Ukrainians at war and we express our condolences because of deaths in peace.”last week that the shooting has “implications for our standing” on the world stage, potentially making the United States a “source of confusion, a source of disbelief for our closest friends and allies — worse yet, an object of pity.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand was more sympathetic. After the devastating 2019 shooting in Christchurch, her nation coupled a national buyback program with a ban on most semiautomatic weapons. She kindlyPerhaps there’s even more to learn from Australia, a country that, like ours, has a culture of hunting and self-reliance, as well as a powerful gun lobby that for years held gun reformers at bay.