The Ease With Which Mass Shooters Get Guns

As Republicans in particular are disavowing that any serious changes to America's insane gun laws are needed and trying to shift blame to mental illness and anything and everything other than the ease with which guns can be acquired.  And in most instances, we are not talking about the types of guns used by legitimate hunters or  a simple hand gun for protection in one's home (not that I believe this is a legitimate reason to have a hand gun).  Slate has put together a history of the mass shootings that have occurred since November, 2009.  In EVERY instance, some or all of the guns, including automatic weapons, were legally purchased.  What is the answer?  A drastic change in America's gun laws - perhaps something akin to what Australia enacted after a horrific mass shooting.  First, highlights from Slate:

On Thursday, after Chris Harper Mercer shot and killed 9 people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, President Obama gave the latest in a tragic series of addresses in response to mass shootings in the U.S. "It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm to get his or her hands on a gun," he said.

But it is remarkably easy to get your hands on a gun in this country. Of the 11 shootings that prompted Obama to give a public address, eight were committed by gunmen who’d bought at least some of their firearms legally, some just days before their massacres. Several had histories of criminal behavior and mental illness that fell just shy of prohibiting their gun purchases—and in one case, a bureaucratic slip-up in the routine FBI background check was at fault. Here’s how the guns in each attack came into the hands of the killers.

Shooting: Military base at Fort Hood, Texas
Date: Nov. 5, 2009
Perpetrator: Nidal Hasan
Guns: FN Five-seven semiautomatic pistol and Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. He killed 13 people and injured more than 30.
How he got them: Guns Galore, a gun shop in Killeen, Texas, sold Hasan the gun legally three months before the shooting. He was not required to register the firearm on the base, because he didn’t reside there.

Shooting: Gabrielle Giffords constituent meeting in a Tucson, Arizona, parking lot
Date: Jan. 8, 2011
Perpetrator: Jared Lee Loughner
Gun: Glock 19 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. Loughner killed six people and shot 13 more, including Rep. Giffords.
How he got it: Arizona, which has some of the laxest gun laws in the country, passed a law in 2010 that allowed people to buy guns for concealed carry without a permit. Though guns cannot be sold to people with severe mental illness and though Loughner was suspended from his community college for mental health issues, no court had ever declared him mentally unfit, so his on-the-spot background check at a gun outlet came up clear.

Shooting: Movie theater in Aurora, Colorado
Date: July 20, 2012
Perpetrator: James E. Holmes
Guns: Holmes used a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P15 (a variation on the military’s M16 weapons), a 12-gauge Remington 870 shotgun, and a semiautomatic .40-caliber Glock 22, killing 12 and injuring 70 . . .
How he got them: All three guns were purchased legally in 2012 between May 22 and July 6 at three different Colorado gun stores.  

Shooting: Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Date: Aug. 5, 2012
Perpetrator: Wade Michael Page
Gun: Like Holmes and Loughner, Page used a semiautomatic handgun.
How he got it: Page purchased the gun legally in a Milwaukee-area store. At the time of the shooting, the Brady Campaign on Gun Violence had named Wisconsin among the 10 states with the fewest gun restrictions.

Shooting: Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut Date: Dec. 14, 2012
Perpetrator: Adam Lanza
Guns: First, Lanza shot and killed his mother with a .22-caliber Savage MK II-F bolt action rifle. At the school, Lanza used an AR-15 semiautomatic, like Holmes. Lanza killed 26 people in total and injured two before killing himself.
How he got them: Both guns belonged to Lanza’s mother.

Shooting: Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.
Date: Sept. 16, 2013
Perpetrator: Aaron Alexis
Gun: Alexis began the attack with a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun (he also took a 9 mm pistol from a police officer at the scene after shooting him). He killed 12 people and injured eight before killing himself.
How he got it: Two days before the massacre, Alexis bought his shotgun at a store in Northern Virginia that claims to be the “only gun shop inside the Beltway.”

Shooting: Military base at Fort Hood, Texas
Date: April 2, 2014
Perpetrator: Ivan Lopez
Gun: .45-caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol. He killed three and injured 14 before killing himself.
How he got it: Lopez purchased his gun legally at the same Killeen, Texas, store that sold Hasan the gun he used in the first Fort Hood shooting. 

Shooting: Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas
Date: April 13, 2014
Suspect: Frazier Glenn Miller Jr.
Guns: Remington Model 870 shotgun and a handgun. Frazier allegedly killed three people.
How he got them: John Mark Reidle of Missouri allegedly bought the shotgun at a Missouri Walmart four days before the massacre, because Miller’s former felony conviction prohibited him from owning a gun. The handgun is of unknown provenance. 

Shooting: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina
Date: June 18, 2015
Suspect: Dylann Roof
Gun: .45-caliber Glock. Roof killed nine people and injured one.
How he got it: A flaw in the FBI’s background check system allowed Roof to buy the handgun at a South Carolina store eight days after his 21^st birthday.  

Shooting: Two military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee
Date: July 16, 2015
Perpetrator: Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez
Guns: . . . a 12-gauge shotgun, a 9 mm handgun, and an assault weapon along the lines of an AK-47. He killed five people and injured two.
How he got them: A friend of Abdulazeez’s said the gunman had bought four firearms from an online arms sale site . . . At least some of the guns were obtained legally.

Shooting: Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon
Date: Oct. 1, 2015
Perpetrator: Chris Harper Mercer
Guns: Harper Mercer brought six guns with him on his shooting spree—five handguns and a rifle—and owned eight others, including pistols, four other rifles, and a shotgun. He killed nine people and injured seven before he was killed by police.
How he got them: All were purchased legally.

So how did Australia end its insanity and mass shootings?  Think Progress looks at the way sanity prevailed.  Here are excerpts:

In 1996, a gunman opened fire at a popular tourist destination on the Australian island of Tasmania. Using a semiautomatic rifle, he killed 35 people.

Australia responded by reforming their gun laws. High powered rifles and shotguns were banned and uniform gun licensing requirements were imposed for the guns that remained legal. The country also implemented a buyback program which resulted in the destruction of more than a million firearms. 

In the last 19 years, there have been no mass shootings in Australia, defined as five or more people being shot.

The effort in Australia was not particuarly partisan. It was led by John Howard, Australia’s very conservative Prime Minister. Rather, the gun control measures were seen as a matter of basic humanity and common sense.

America has done nothing.  In the wake of Oregon mass murder, Australians are disgusted and perplexed by the American response. . . . . The disgust is not limited to Australian shores. The New York Times struck a similar note. “Mass shootings have become an unsurprising part of American life, with lame public rituals in which politicians express grief and then retreat quickly into denial about this scourge,” the paper’s editorial board wrote Friday.