PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Nine students and a teacher were slaughtered at a school in the city of Graz on June 10. Eight days later, the government of Austria announced that it will likely enact strict gun-safety laws.
This movement compares to swift legislative action taken by Australia in 1996 and New Zealand in 2019 following the shooting deaths of 35 in Tanzania, an island that is part of Australia, and 51 mosque worshippers in Christchurch, N.Z.
Back home, a series of high-profile shooting deaths triggered a supposedly forceful bipartisan resolution that was introduced last Wednesday by Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators. It condemns “the rise in ideologically motivated attacks on Jewish individuals…and reaffirm(s) the commitment of the Senate to combatting antisemitism and politically motivated violence,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Does this mean that the Senate has been antisemitic during the last 2 ½ centuries and has at last become tolerant of Jews? Otherwise, there is no point to this resolution introduced by Sen. Dave McCormick, who lives near the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 Jewish worshippers died in a shooting spree, and Sen. John Fetterman, who lives 10 miles south of the shul in Braddock.
The Senate can do better, even more than offer prayers for the victims and their families, as senators often do after a gun-violence tragedy. They can enact strong gun safety laws that will probably prevent many more of these shooting deaths.
It has been for many years – and many bodies – that the Senate and the House of Representatives evaded legislative action to stem gun violence. During a debate with former Sen. Robert Casey Jr. last October, McCormick said most gun violence crimes are committed with illegal guns and that restricting gun ownership will not solve it.
The resolution is all well and good, but who pays attention? McCormick, a Republican, has no need to convince me of his concern for Jews. He campaigned in Jewish communities before he narrowly defeated Casey last November. He had many Jewish neighbors in Westport, Connecticut, before adopting Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood as his home base in Pennsylvania, which is the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh.
If McCormick genuinely wants to help the Jewish community, not to mention all Americans, he will follow the lead of Austria, Australia and New Zealand by striving to enact strong gun-safety laws. If he is worried about law-abiding gun owners, they will be able to hold onto their weapons so long as they obey the law.
McCormick’s Republican colleagues persist in failing to consider gun safety legislation. Not after two Israeli embassy employees were fatally gunned down on May 21 a half mile from McCormick’s office on Capitol Hill. Nor after a deranged gunman arrived at the home of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and murdered them with his gun in Brooklyn Park on June 14.
Interestingly, Brooklyn Park is home to a sizeable Jewish community, but there is no indication that antisemitism was a motivating factor.
This would be an opportune time for Republicans in Congress to join Democrats who have supported gun safety laws for decades. Fetterman, for example, said in a news release that he co-sponsored a bill to ban assault weapons during his first week in office.
Before President Trump ordered the bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran, his MAGA fans were snarling at one another when he tried to decide whether to partner with Israel in its war against Iran. Republicans who normally revere Trump intensely opposed America taking any military action.
If one MAGA faction can challenge Trump over the Middle East, then Republicans who principally stay in the GOP for Israel can challenge the party over gun violence. They can help their fellow Jews by preventing another Tree of Life incident, where the 11 Jewish Pittsburghers were killed; the murder of a Jewish woman at Chabad of Poway; and the shootings of Sarah Milgrim and her boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, outside the Capital Jewish Museum.
Milgrim was Jewish and Lischinsky’s father is Jewish; he identified as a Christian.
On the same day that McCormick and Fetterman introduced their resolution, the Austrian government proposed new laws restricting private gun ownership that would require a four-week waiting period between the purchase and the delivery of a first weapon, and raising the minimum age to own some firearms to 25 from 21, according to The New York Times.
The legislation is expected to be passed by a large majority, crossing party lines in Austria which of course is unlike our Congress. The 21-year-old suspect, who police said was found dead in an apparent suicide, was able to legally buy the guns that he used, a Glock pistol and a shotgun that he had modified. Graz is Austria’s second largest city.
Nearly three decades ago, a gunman murdered 35 people in Port Arthur in Tanzania, prompting a public furor to restrict firearms. Another Times article reports that the Australian government enacted the National Firearms Agreement that bans automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles and pump shotguns in all but unusual cases.
Pushed through by John Howard, then the conservative prime minister, the law tightened licensing rules, required a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases, established a national gun registry and created a temporary buyback program that removed more than 20 percent of firearms from public circulation. The Times reports that there have been no mass killings since, though it was not a problem before the Port Arthur incident in 1996.
Most semiautomatic weapons were temporarily banned in New Zealand six days after a gunman murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. By mid-April, lawmakers voted 119-1 to make the ban permanent, according to Newsweek.
Then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who imposed the temporary ban on March 21, pointed out that the gunman had obtained the guns used in the attacks legally and readily modified them to hold more than 60 bullets per magazine.
“I could not fathom how weapons that could cause such destruction and large-scale death could have been obtained legally in this country,” she said.
“We had the ability with, actually, the unanimous support of parliamentarians to place a ban on semiautomatic, military-style weapons and assault rifles. So, we did that.”
Ardern intentionally praised the opposition for being “nothing but constructive.” She added there were few occasions “when I have seen Parliament come together in this way, and I cannot imagine circumstances where that is more necessary than it is now.”
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.