Westneat: Other U.S. contagion back

That’s over. We’ve had seven mass shootings this year including the killing of eight at Georgia spas and the gun massacre of 10 Monday at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store.

There was a scourge of murder by gun during the pandemic, including here in Seattle, but it tended to involve an underlying crime like robbery or drug dealing, or where the victim and killer knew one other. What stopped everywhere during COVID-19, criminologists say, were those “indiscriminate assaults at a concert, restaurant, or other public setting” that kill four or more people and that terrorize the broader public, said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who studies the phenomenon.

I had almost forgotten, too, about the tortured rituals that nurtured this old epidemic. You know, there’s the “thoughts and prayers” phase, followed by the pointless debate about “it’s a mental health problem, not a gun problem” (pointless because it’s obviously both). It ends with a shrug that it’s all something no law can possibly fix.

Former President Obama said it best Tuesday: “A once-in-a-century pandemic cannot be the only thing that slows mass shootings in this country. We shouldn’t have to choose between one type of tragedy and another.”

Agreed. So what is being done to prevent mass shootings?

Republicans in Congress had already thrown up their hands on Tuesday: “Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.

The Legislature isn’t much better. They couldn’t muster so much as a hearing this session on a proposal to ban assault-style rifles.

What’s maddening is that it’s not hard to imagine putting up simple roadblocks to shootings like the ones in Atlanta and Boulder, without banning guns or violating the constitutional rights of regular gun owners.

How? Both shootings were impetuous – in Boulder, the gunman bought his AR-15 style assault rifle six days before the shooting, and in Atlanta, the 9 mm handgun was purchased the same day. So both maybe could have been prevented with a simple training requirement. Thanks to voters here, who approved Initiative 1639 in 2018, we have such a law for assault rifles.

In Washington, you have to complete a firearm safety training program before you can buy an assault rifle. This came about after the insane situation in 2016, when a teenager in Mukilteo bought an assault rifle at Cabela’s, and then, because he had no clue how to use it, sat in his car reading the instruction manual before shooting up a party, killing three and injuring one.

So voters here made it harder. It should be made harder with respect to buying modern handguns, too. The right to bear arms can be maintained without making it so flippantly easy that even people having a mental crisis can just grab and go.

But people have been pointing out obvious things like this for decades, and it doesn’t make a dent in Congress. I realized Tuesday, listening to their debate, that I shouldn’t have been taken aback last year when so many political leaders went into denial about the coronavirus, treating it as a partisan hoax.

They have a long track record of doing exactly that with America’s other deadly contagion.