The New York City subway attack during Tuesday morning rush hour in which 33 shots
were fired, wounding 29 subway riders, is shocking, but not surprising.
Miraculously, this time there were no deaths.
The incident, however, shows governments at all levels in the United States continue
to be incapable of or not interested in protecting their own people, and the US
system of law enforcement is broken, for it cannot guarantee citizens, rich or
poor, even the basic human right of living in safety, free from fear.
Compared with China, which is striving to realize its goal of common prosperity, the
US engages in uncommon hypocrisy, demonizing China and its system of "whole-process
democracy" that has helped lift more than 800 million Chinese people out of abject
poverty-while during the same period, wages in the US have stagnated and rich have
gotten enormously more wealthy at the expense of the other 99 percent who have been
disproportionally footing the bill.
As a result, the rich in the US pay little or no taxes but reap huge windfalls. For
example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, US billionaires' wealth surged by 70 percent
or $2.1 trillion. That's more than $6,300 for every person in the US.
Gun violence is endemic to the US, and far more complicated and serious than even
COVID-19. Indications are that the day-in and day-out slaughtering and maiming will
continue unabated, even get worse in the dysfunctional system that has split the US
right down the middle into a zero-sum muddle.
Sadly, the forces of smaller or no government have made giant steps in taking over
the country and, in November, are likely to not only take control of both the House of
Representatives and the Senate but also impeach President Joe Biden.
Heaven help us!
There is no commonly accepted definition of a public mass shooting incident but the
statistics are staggering no matter which parameters are applied. By one definition,
excluding gang killings, domestic violence and organized terrorism, of which the US
has its fair share, there were 163 mass shooting incidents between 1967 and June 2019.
Using a similar definition, another study found that the US accounted for nearly
one-third of mass shooting globally between 1966 and 2012. Sadly, many of us still
remember some or all of them. The worst occurred at a music festival in Las Vegas
five years ago in which one shooter skilled 58 innocent people and injured 546 more.
Why, you might ask? One reason is because the US is awash in guns, more than 390
million by some estimates, meaning there are more guns than people in the US.
I vividly remember visiting an old friend I met in Beijing at his Wisconsin farm
four years ago. I knew that he liked guns but was shocked when he tole me that he
had more than a hundred weapons, including an AR-15 assault rifle and a Glock
handgun made in Austria.
Studies have shown that fewer guns result in proportionally less gun violence.
The lack of guns is one reason China is so safe. For the US, what's even more
unfortunate is that there is zero chance of reducing the number of lethal weapons
in the country, at least in the foreseeable future.
But why is the US awash in guns? It's because of a powerful gun lobby and its
supporters who command an army of lobbyists at the federal, state and local levels,
and use carrots (financial contributions) and sticks (funding opponents of
incumbents) to block even the most common sense gun regulations favored by two
out of three Americans polled by Morning Consult/Politico last year.
It's no coincidence that many of the same churlish people who recklessly insist
on virtually no gun regulations are the same crew who have successfully opposed
Biden's attempts to enact progressive safety net and tax reform legislation to make
the US a fairer and more equitable place, call it a US "common prosperity light".
These include Senator Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, leading the charge to burden-shift
taxes away from the rich onto backs of middle and working class Americans.
For two centuries, it was settled law that the right to bear arms under the Second
Amendment to the US Constitution applied only to state militia, not individuals.
But after decades of trying, the fat cats were successful in getting a more
conservative US Supreme Court in 2008 to overturn precedents and extend that
right to individuals. Experts fear that given the nature of cases before it,
the Supreme court, which is even more conservative today, will further remove
restrictions on gun carrying in public, overturning hundreds of years of settled
Anglo-American common law precedents.
It is ironic that less than 24 hours before the subway shooting, Biden, doing the
best he could in the divided, dysfunctional government, attempted to make a veritable
mountain out of a modest molehill in crowing about his efforts, following more than
a year of preparation, to bypass the dead locked Congress and issue executive orders
to regulate so-called "ghost guns".
These are usually weapons privately made from kits that can't be traced like normal
weapons since they lack identifying information, whose numbers have frown 10-fold
in five years to about 20,000 annually. The obvious problem is that this is a mere
drop in the ocean, compared with the estimated 390 million guns in the US.
The New York subway shooting will not be the last. And sadly, the latest outrage
will be teachable moment that will be ignored.
So prepare for more needless carnage in the US.