The US is not expected to put gun control on the agenda even after the country’s unprecedented levels of gun violence, an expert said, as a teenage boy opened fire with a handgun at a Kentucky high school on Tuesday, killing two fellow students and wounding more than a dozen people in the latest mass shooting to hit the United States.
The unnamed 15-year-old student, now in custody, is alleged to have carried out the attack at Marshall County High School in Benton, a small town in western Kentucky.
One of the students died at the scene and the other after being taken to a hospital. Seventeen students were injured, 12 of them hit with bullets and five others hurt in the scramble as hundreds of students fled for their lives from the school, Kentucky State Police said, adding that those hurt ranged in age from 14 to 18 years old.
The shooter struck at 7:57 am when the school day was just starting. Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin said the shooter was apprehended in a “nonviolent” manner, and will be charged with two counts of murder and multiple counts of attempted murder.
First one this year
The attack marked the year’s first fatal school shooting in the country, according to data from Every Town for Gun Safety, a US organization that works to reduce gun violence, which also said that since 2013, there have been nearly 300 school shootings in the country – an average of about one a week. The rate is 25 times higher than that of other developed countries.
Meanwhile, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistic revealed that seven children or teenagers (age 19 or under) are killed with guns in the US every day and rates of firearm injury death increase rapidly after age 12.
Teng Jianqun, director of the department of US studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the US government may take further measures to strengthen the control of firearms, such as tightening the qualification check of gun purchasers and strengthening gun control over those with mental problems, however, he believed that it is obvious that gun control will not be the focus of the government’s agenda in the future.
“Most of the US civilians want to strengthen gun control as with fewer firearms, the number of attacks will naturally drop,” Teng said, adding that the enthusiasm of owning guns among them has been “steadily increased especially after shootings as many think that having guns is a safe choice”.
At the political level, as the major rifle associations in the US have a strong influence in the political arena of the country, even though politicians are aware of the importance of gun control, they cannot touch the sensitive “nerve”, Teng said.
