Of all the mass killings that have occurred in recent years anywhere in the world, the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut must rank as one of the most heart breaking.

It is unthinkable that a young man could be so crazed as to murder 20 youngsters and six adults in such a cold-blooded manner.

It may have happened in the US, but tragedies like this affect all of us. Any parent or grandparent of elementary school kids, any brother and sister, cousin or friend or neighbor…everyone must stop and pause to ask: Why did this happen? And when will all the senseless killings of the helpless stop?

US President Barack Obama reacted no differently than any other human being would when he learned of the carnage. As he addressed his countrymen to apprise them of what had happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, he must have been thinking of his own daughters and what the parents of the victims must be feeling.

In a supreme display of Christianity, one grieving father reached out to the family of the suspected gunman, Adam Lanza. Robbie Parker, whose six-year-old daughter Emilie was among the 12 girls and eight boys killed, said “our family and our love and our support goes out to you (the Lanza family) as well.”

After this tragedy, we can expect that there will be renewed calls for greater gun control in the US. Perhaps this time, despite the powerful lobby from the National Rifle Association (NRA), the overwhelming majority of Americans will take heed and insist that stricter laws be crafted by their lawmakers and implemented by their government to considerably lessen that availability of the deadliest sort of firearms to those of unsound mind.

The NRA likes to say that guns don’t people; people kill people. What the powerful gun lobby can never explain is why between 9,000 and 10,000 Americans are killed every year with the use of firearms, when the average number in other industrialized nations is counted in the low hundreds.

The NRA did not even bother to offer its condolences to the families of the victims, only saying that they reserved the right to comment only after all the data had been made known.

Look at the military grade assault rifle that was used against the children. Were such a deadly weapon been unavailable to the prime suspect, it can be said that there would not have been as many victims.

The right of every American to own firearms may be guaranteed by their constitution, but it must end where the rights of innocents to be protected against the likes of Adam Lanza begins. In recent years, more and more Adam Lanzas have surfaced, frequently posing a danger to those with little or no connection them, except the most incidental—they happened to be in his line of fire.

Not in the Philippines
There has never been any incident in the Philippines that can match the senselessness and brutality of what happened in the US a couple of days ago, except perhaps the Maguindanao Massacre. What makes that incident different is that it was perpetrated as a political act by a power-mad family.

Random acts of violence committed by individuals against large groups of strangers, on the other hand, are happening with increasing regularity in the US.

We Filipinos can, therefore, be thankful that whatever it is in American culture of this 21st century that causes individuals to become mass murderers is not present in the country.

We do not say that unnecessary violence does not happen here. We all know it does. But unhinged individuals becoming suicidal killers have not surfaced here, perhaps because there is no perfect combination of easy availability of the deadliest firearms with the absence of an outlet for one’s frustrations.

When will it happen again?
In time, the tragedy in Connecticut will become part of modern day history, although families and friends of the victims will never, ever forget. But unless the rules on gun ownership are revised, a repeat of the incident cannot be discounted.

Barely a week before the latest mass killings, another madman went on a shooting rampage in a mall. By some stroke of luck, he only managed to kill two when he could easily have killed dozens. Then he went and killed himself.

Only the people and the government of the United States of American can decide if the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings will serve as a watershed moment, resulting in necessary changes to their loose gun ownership laws.

Let the debate end once and for all. The NRA is wrong, dead wrong. In the hands of unsound minds, guns kill people.