Once again, we Canadians are left looking on aghast as our neighbours in America respond to yet another mass school shooting. As the survivors plead for urgent change, America’s leaders contort facts and logic to propose ever more bizarre solutions – including the suggestion that the problem isn’t too many guns, it’s that there aren’t enough.

President Donald Trump calling on teachers to arm themselves in response to America’s mass shooting epidemic doesn’t just put more students’ lives at risk. It also weaponizes what should be safe, non-threatening environments for children and turns them into war zones.

Students in high schools and colleges across the United States – the front line in mass shootings – are taking note. I hope they will continue to mobilize, knowing that legislators feel no remorse in selling them out to gun manufacturers.

That’s how little their lives are worth to them: a few days of hand-wringing and ritualized fatuities about thoughts and prayers, but not enough to reject NRA propaganda, or ban AR-15s, or make weapons sales even slightly more restrictive. The kids are not all right, because they are being hunted down in places that should offer them comfort and acceptance, and the very people tasked with protecting them are condemning them to more violence and atrocity.

To be clear on this point: mass shootings are not a people problem. They are a gun problem. Americans, according to a study by University of Alabama professor Alan Lankford and profiled in the New York Times, own 42 per cent of the world’s guns. The same article points out that the only country with a higher rate of mass shootings was Yemen, which has been entangled in a brutal civil war for the past three years.

Mass shootings happen in the United States with more frequency and lethality than in any other developed nation in the world. And the biggest, most consistent, variable in that equation? The ease and availability of guns, especially powerful weapons that can be efficiently automated to murder dozens of civilians in a matter of seconds.

Why would anyone need that kind of firepower? For one reason: to kill. Not for sport shooting, not for fun, but to have a weapon at the ready that can shred entire classrooms with the twitch of a finger. So easy. Too easy.

U.S. legislators owe it to those in the crosshairs to make it harder to commit mass murder. Rigorous background checks. A ban on online and gun-show sales. An end to AR-15s and other military-grade weaponry. These are not difficult measures to implement, if human lives are valued more than campaign contributions by those elected to serve.

Yet here is Florida Senator Marco Rubio – who has reportedly received more than $3 million from the NRA – telling Florida’s Parkland shooting survivors demanding a curb on gun sales that they “don’t understand” the gun lobby. It seems they understand all too well.

The evidence is clear and incontrovertible: every developed nation that has imposed stricter gun control in the wake of mass shootings saw a precipitous decline in mass shootings and other gun-related deaths.

In Australia. mass shootings dropped by 93 per cent after a successful government gun “buy-back” program following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which saw 35 people slaughtered.

In the United Kingdom, after strict gun-control measures were introduced in the wake of the Dunblane massacre of 15 kindergartners, there has only been one mass shooting in the 22 years since.

Here in Canada, where we have looser gun laws than the U.K. but tighter controls relative to the United States, gun-related homicides are eight times fewer per capita.

There is only one thing that Newtown (26 dead), Orlando (49 dead), Las Vegas (58 dead), and Parkland (17 dead) have in common: semi-automatic weapons. The shooters all spanned different ages and backgrounds. Not all had a history of mental health issues. Their motivations were, on the whole, considerably different. What correlates in this violent equation is the guns, not the people.

Trump and others contemptuously claiming that guns are the answer to America’s gun problem may as well be saying that cigarettes can cure lung cancer: their statements fly in the face of all rational evidence to the contrary. Worse still, they are betraying generations of young Americans who are being forced to learn and grow up in increasingly militarized environments. Are they made safer by encouraging teachers to take up arms and shoot students perceived to be a threat? Is that how educators nurture trusting, caring, emotionally stable adults?

As young people from across the United States descend on Washington, D.C., and state legislatures, their voices deserve to be amplified, and there are a number of ways to achieve this.

Many teachers’ pension funds across North America have holdings in the world’s arms manufacturers, including the Florida and New York Teachers Pension Funds, both of which have investments in Sturm, Ruger Co., manufacturer of the AR-15. Divesting from weapons is one way for teachers to demonstrate that they stand in solidarity with their students.

Political candidates who openly advocate for gun control need financial and volunteer support. And those who resist gun control measures should be actively and consistently opposed, until NRA endorsements and contributions are seen as politically toxic.

It’s not enough to say nothing can be done, when other countries have already done it and proven that it works. The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution asserts the right to bear arms. It does not assert that those rights are unlimited.

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Parkland’s students understand this. Hopefully the adults elected to protect them will too.

Dr. Samantha Nutt is the Founder of War Child Canada and best-selling author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid.

Correction - March 8, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said there have been no mass shootings in the United Kingdom since strict gun-control measures were introduced in the wake of the Dunblane massacre of 15 kindergartners.



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