US President Joe Biden called on Congress to take action against the epidemic of gun violence in America.
Tuesday’s call came after a new massacre on the University of Michigan campus that left three people dead and five injured.
As the leader of a nation plagued by daily shootings, Biden said he promised the Democratic governor to “deploy all necessary federal law enforcement.”
The gunman shot and killed his victims, all students, during a riot on the Michigan State University (MSU) campus before dying hours later from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
At an emotional press conference in Lansing, the capital of the north-central state, police said the 43-year-old suspect, Anthony McRae, had nothing to do with the school and was found dead around midnight on Monday.
At the briefing, a visibly shaken Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called the problem of gun violence “a uniquely American problem.”
In an interview with reporters, she said that the university has become “another place where there should be communities and togetherness, destroyed by bullets and bloodshed.”
Biden carried this idea through to the end in two consecutive White House statements.
“Too many American communities have been devastated by gun violence,” he said.
“I have taken action to combat this epidemic in America, including a historic number of executive actions and the first significant gun safety law in almost 30 years, but we must do more,” he said.
The shooting came on the eve of the anniversary of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 14 students and three staff members.
The shooting should “make every American say ‘enough’ and demand that Congress take action,” Biden said.
Slow progress
Biden unsuccessfully urged Congress to restore the national assault rifle ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, but has faced opposition from Republicans, who are staunch defenders of the constitutional right to bear arms and have a slim majority in the House of Representatives. representatives since January.
Following gunshots at the campus building where two students were killed early Monday evening, thousands of students were ordered to take cover in place.
The shooter fled to the student union, where he killed another student, sparking a major police operation when the cops flooded the 5,000-acre campus.
Police received a tip from a local resident after a CCTV camera quickly posted images of a black man wearing a baggy blue jacket and red shoes.
The university’s acting deputy police chief, Chris Roseman, told a press conference Tuesday that authorities still “absolutely don’t know what the motives were.”
He said authorities seized the gun and searched the home associated with the suspect.
Gun violence is alarmingly common in the United States, a country where there are more guns than people and where efforts to stop their spread are always met with stiff resistance.
The shooting on a school campus in the US Midwest was the second in 15 months, spokeswoman Elissa Slotkin stressed at a press conference, saying: “If this isn’t a wake-up call to do something, I don’t know what is.”
In November 2021, four students were killed and seven others injured when a 15-year-old student opened fire at Oxford High School in the rural town of Oxford, Michigan.
“I am furious that we have to hold another press conference to talk about our children being killed in their schools,” Slotkin said, calling for action against gun violence.
According to the university’s website, about 50,000 students study at MSU, the leading institution in the United States, most of them students.
Tens of thousands of people die every year in the United States after being shot, and many more are injured.
Last month, eleven people were shot dead when an elderly man opened fire at a dance hall in California where locals were celebrating the Lunar New Year.
