By Uche Onyebadi
LAST week, 14-year-old Jaylen Fryberg calmly walked to his school, Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Washington State, and took out his anger on his fellow students. He was armed with a .40 caliber handgun.

So far, three people died in the incident (including the shooter) and at least three others are still battling with their lives. The fatalities could have been worse but for the timely intervention of a school teacher who prevented the young, angry teenager from quickly re-loading his gun when he ran out of bullets.

As usual, the country is in mourning that another shooting incident and resulting deaths have taken place. People are outraged. Media talk-shows are swarmed with discussions about the increasing incidents of school shootings in the land of freedom. Sooner than later, the anger will die down and life will go on as usual, until another deranged student picks up a gun to commit another round of mayhem. And, I am referring to school shootings, not the issue of shootings in U.S. society as a whole.

Just to show how school shootings are gradually becoming the new normal in U.S., there have been about 82 of such incidents since the country witnessed one of its worst school shooting disasters in December 2012 when 20-year-old Adam Lanzer massacred 20 kids and 6 adults at the Sandi Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The tragedy is that nothing substantial has taken place since the 2012 killings, to seriously address and curb these wanton shootings, killing and wounding of innocent people.

After a shooting incident at a school in Oregon in June this year, an angry but powerless President Obama said: “We’re the only developed country on earth where this happens….Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on earth that would put up with this.”

Unfortunately, the president could only vent his anger about the incident because all efforts to get the U.S. Congress enact a law to check gun availability and gun violence have been met with a wall of reinforced concrete. Despite the tears and anguish of families and friends who have lost their loved ones in these dastardly incidents, Congress is in no mood to even discuss any law that would deal with gun violence.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is always there to fight such laws under the guise that they will infringe the second amendment of the country’s constitution. The NRA and its allies in Congress will not even discuss the idea of introducing meaningful background checks on anyone who applies for a permit to own a gun. The NRA and its lobbyists are quite adroit at playing on some people’s fears that such checks are part of President Obama’s plans to take their guns away.

Fact is, gun ownership is tied to the constitutional freedoms enjoyed by Americans. The so-called protection of this freedom appears to ignore the fact that victims of gun violence also have a constitutional right to life. The NRA mantra is that guns don’t kill; people do.  On its surface, this is sensible argument.

But, the gun advocates are silent on the fact people do kill with guns; that guns in the hands of people with mental problems do not make society safe. And, you cannot imagine how easy it is to obtain such guns. You can go to one of the huge supermarket chains or gun shops and legitimately buy one.

The problem however, is the inadequacy or absence of thorough background checks to determine your suitability to own a gun. The second problem is that you can buy the gun and resell it the way you can sell your pair of shoes. No questions asked. Then, the biggest problem is that you can go to a gun show and buy a gun of your choice without any form of background check; you just pay and walk away with it.

Another issue that hardly receives the attention it deserves is the idea of guns in the hands of teenagers and school kids.  Take the case of the latest killer, Jaylen Fryberg. For his fourteenth birthday, his parents bought him a gun as a present. Adam Lanza who massacred the Sandyhook kids had unlimited access to the guns in his mother’s house, and it was said that she had taken him for guns lessons and gun shows several times in the past.

Unlimited  access to guns

When the time was ripe for Lanza to kill people, his first victim was of course his mother. Perhaps the most bizarre case was that of a 9-year-old girl who killed a man in August this year in Arizona. Her victim was Charles Vacca. Charles, a gun-trainer, was teaching this young girl how to operate the powerful Uzzi rifle at a shooting range when she accidentally shot him in the head, having lost her balance during practice.

Why are these kids being introduced to guns? No one can tell beyond the constitutional freedom to do so being exercized by their parents. One thing to note is the state of mind of some of these kids who shoot their schoolmates and then kill themselves.

When security agents visit their facebook pages and read the tweets they had sent the days or weeks preceding their decision to shoot and kill their colleagues, it is usually the case that a lot of hate messages and bitterness indicating troubled minds are found. When a kid in such frame of mind has unlimited access to guns owned by his/her parents or the ones that were bought by the same parents and given to him or her as a birthday gift, society should indeed not be shocked at what would happen next.

These incidents of school shooting are gradually making Americans “unshockable,” if I may borrow this word from one of Nigeria’s foremost journalists, Dele Giwa.