There is grief in America but no shock because everyone has seen it before and knows they will see it again. Between the day of the shooting and the publication of this article, about 1000 Americans will have been shot dead, writes John Silvester
It is about 2½ hours down the road along Interstate 35 from the small Texas town of Uvalde to Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin.
Yet he knew it wasn’t enough. On signing the 1968 Gun Control Act, he said: “This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. “We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilised nations have long ago adopted.”
I have also sat and talked to police whose lives have been permanently altered after they went to work on a routine shift and ended up shooting someone.Seven prime ministers ago, John Howard didn’t just pray for the victims of the, in which 35 people were shot dead by a lone gunman, he decided to take on the gun lobby. He didn’t go to church to pray for change, he went to parliament to make the change.
In Australia in 2019-20, there were 35 gunshot murder victims, a total exceeded in the US every 15 hours. An AR-15 is the civilian version of a military weapon originally designed to kill people. It fires about 40 bullets a minute. Its point target range is 550 metres. This means an average shooter will hit a human-size target 50 per cent of the time. Its maximum range is 3.6 kilometres.
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