Fifteen people celebrating Hanukkah died on Australia’s iconic Bondi Beach Sunday. At least 40 were wounded in the country’s worst gun massacre in 30 years. The mass shooting by a father-son team was inspired by the Islamic State, Australian authorities said.
At Brown University over the weekend: Another horrific attack. Two died and nine were hurt by a shooter who was at large Tuesday. Classes and exams at the Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., were cancelled.
Across the nation this year as of Dec. 16, more than 41,000 people died in gun violence deaths, almost 17,000 of which were murders, unintentional shootings or deaths not classified as suicides.
In South Carolina in 26 gun violence incidents since Dec. 1, seven victims and two suspects died. More than 25 people were hurt. Police arrested 11.
In the same time period, two shootings occurred in Charleston County: a 17-year-old died Dec. 10 on Ashley Avenue, while a person was hurt two days earlier in a Mount Pleasant shooting.
Lots of blood. Lots of pain. Lots of death. Lots of torn-apart families.
Something needs to be done. But in the 10 years since the 2015 massacre of nine people by a White supremacist at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, the South Carolina General Assembly has done virtually nothing.
For 2026, it is morally obligated to pass two measures:
First, it must pass a hate crimes law to stiffen penalties for hate-motivated crimes, such as the slaughter of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney and eight of his church members in June 2015. South Carolina and Wyoming remain the only two states without such a law. In 2024, the S.C. House passed the measure, but it died in the state Senate without a vote. This year, similar bills sat virtually dormant.
Second, elected state officials must approve a measure to close the so-called Charleston loophole that makes it easier for people like Emanuel murderer Dylann Roof to buy guns. Roof, who had a history of drug use, was allowed to buy a pistol despite an arrest that should have blocked the gun purchase. But because his FBI background check wasn’t completed within three business days, he was allowed to buy the gun.
These are problems that are relatively easy to fix — if Republicans in the legislature can find the courage to join already committed Democrats to pass the bills. To do otherwise is assent to the continuation of mindless killing.
Most people who want these two safety measures don’t want to take away people’s guns. They want to regulate them, just like we regulate another killing apparatus — the automobile. (For more on what the framers of the Constitution might have thought, see that adjectival phrase
in the Second Amendment — “well-regulated militia.”)
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