On the morning of Monday, July 4, as the United States was gearing up for its 246th annual celebration of independence from Britain, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s ultra-powerful gun rights organisation – offered the following inspirational reminder on Twitter: “The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed”. The tweet ended with the hashtag “#FourthofJuly”.
This was before Monday’s mass shooting in the affluent Chicago, Illinois suburb of Highland Park killed seven people and wounded dozens of others at July 4 festivities in what Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering described as an act of “terror that was brought upon us”. Parents with strollers and children on tricycles fled for their lives. And yet the horrific casualty toll was not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of things that can happen “because citizens were armed”.
As NBC Chicago reported before the clock had even struck 9am on Monday, at least 57 people had already been shot in the city of Chicago alone over the Fourth of July weekend – nine of them fatally. Nationwide as of July 4, the US had registered no fewer than 309 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter”.
There are more guns than people in the US, and this is certainly a large part of the problem – particularly as states like Texas, which recently hosted the Uvalde massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers, ensure that it is essentially as easy to acquire a firearm as it is to acquire laundry detergent. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.