A year after US school massacre, gun control remains elusive
- Category: Gun Rights News Archives
- Hits: 512
On Valentine's Day of last year, a 19-year-old armed with a military-style assault rifle walked into his old high school in Parkland, Florida and slaughtered 17 people. That spasm in America's epidemic of gun violence gave new impetus the debate on controlling firearms, prompting marches across the country and a fresh round of hand-wringing in cable news studios.Many of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors such as David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez remain national figures a year on -- a testament to their tenacity in keeping the atrocity in the headlines -- yet concrete reform has remained limited and local.Meanwhile America risks becoming inured to the carnage: four months before Parkland a gunman killed 58 people at a festival in Las Vegas while, 16 months earlier, a massacre at a gay night club in Orlando left 49 dead.And with 37 mass shootings -- those with at least four victims, not including the assailant -- recorded already in the US this year, it is tempting to conclude that almost nothing has changed. The Parkland students, pictured at the 2018 Time 100 Gala in New York on April 24, 2018, remain national figures a year on from the shooting Jemal Countess, GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File The inertia on gun control endures despite the best efforts of the Parkland students, who rejected the usual outpourings of sympathy offered by politicians and launched a nationwide movement seeking tougher regulation on sales."So many shootings have happened and you get 'thoughts and prayers' and then nothing happens," said Ryan Servaites, who survived the shooting."It's an absolute shame that our government has done absolutely nothing about it. So you know, we're fed up," Servaites, 16, told AFP.- 'Our childhood ended' -A month after the shooting, the student activists brought together hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in
