Halloween night of 1992 shook the whole world with the brutal murder of 16-year-old Japanese student Yoshihiro Hattori in Louisiana of United States. Hattori, who did not know English, was on his way to a Halloween party and went to the wrong house by accident and rang the bell, only to get killed by the property’s owner, Rodney Peairs, who thought that Hattori was trespassing with criminal intention.
Surprisingly, Hattori’s killer Rodney Peairs was not found guilty by a 12-member jury and just took three hours to acquit him from the charge amid his confessional statement of killing the boy, shooting him at point blank range. Peairs’s lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, closed his argument saying: “You have the absolute legal right in this country to answer your door with a gun.”
It is too easy to have a gun in the United States and the use of guns often turns fatal. According to a study by New America, a Washington-based research group, 48 people were killed by supremacists in United States, which is more than twice in number than the deaths caused by self-proclaimed Jihadists since 9/11. In this same period, more than 150,000 Americans have been killed in gun homicides.
In the four recent incidents of mass shooting -- the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Aurora shooting, and the Charleston church shooting -- a total of 81 people were killed, including children. Recently, with the deaths of two on-duty journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, by one of their colleagues who was sacked by the television channel authority for whom they worked for, we can guess the current state of gun control in the US.
Bangladeshis residing in the US are not safe either. Only one week before the Virginia incident, a Bangladeshi was killed after being shot several times in front of his house. In 2012, three Bangladeshis were killed within a month in different parts of the US. All of them received bullet wounds before their death. In addition, white supremacists and people with troubled pasts were responsible for many mass shooting incidents in the US in the last couple of years.
In most of these cases, it is seen that the murderers killed themselves after the heinous crime they had committed. Surprisingly enough, the shooting took place within two weeks of the much-talked about court verdict that gave the 2012 Aurora shooting accused life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, indicating that the trials are not going to put an end to such incidents.
Taking Australia as an example, one can clearly understand how a tougher gun control law can save hundreds of lives. Almost 20 years ago in Australia, a man with a rifle ended up killing 35 people and wounded another 28 in Tasmania. John Howard, who was prime minister at the time, decided that guns were the problem.
Australia confiscated almost 700,000 guns within a year. The guns were then destroyed.
However, in the US, the gun control lobby has always favoured the democrats and the Obama administration took some quick steps after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. President Obama seemed to have tried their best to make some reforms in this regard, but were in vain.
Obama expressed his frustration in a recent interview, saying: “We do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings.”
The answer to the question of why Americans have failed to go for tougher gun-control laws is more surprising. It was found in some studies that Americans are less supportive of tougher gun control despite repeated mass shootings. And the heavily-funded gun rights lobby is always there to foil any attempt to impose any sort of restriction over the use of guns.
However, the killing of two on-duty journalists, recently in California, is presumably going to revive the same old debate for greater gun control. Hopefully, Americans will soon realise that their gun laws require a little more sanity -- it may save many innocent lives.