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School shootings are recurring markers of a societal sickness, an unshakeable acceptance of violence and senseless death. The murder of two 14-year-old students and two teachers on Wednesday, and the wounding of nine others, at a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, is the latest in this seemingly permanent contagion.

Ninth-grader Colt Gray, 14, had an AR platform-style weapon, the popular semi-automatic gun all too widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations and modular accessories flooding the multi-billion-dollar gun market.

We know that the accused lived in a home with guns, thanks to a statement from the FBI issued on Wednesday, that read in part:

"In May 2023, the FBI ... received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns. Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia, and the FBI's Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office for action. The Jackson County Sheriff's Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated that he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject. ...There was no probable cause to take any additional law enforcement action."

Authorities had advance warning over a year earlier. Apalachee High School then reportedly received a telephoned threat on the morning of the shooting, warning that five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee.

The so-called "AR platform" has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. At the Uvalde mass school shooting in Texas on May 24, 2022, the teenage shooter killed 21 people, injured 21 more, and held 400 law enforcement personnel at bay, while he killed children one by one for over an hour. It was the lethality of the AR rifle that kept those hundreds of heavily-armed agents too frightened to intervene.

As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, made a renewal of the assault weapons ban a central part of her campaign. She called for the same as recently as December 2023, while still just the running mate for Joe Biden.

But now, amidst a tight general election race against Donald Trump, Harris is being more measured. As news broke of the Apalachee shooting, Harris was taking the stage at a rally in New Hampshire.

"Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families, of course, and we are grateful to the first responders and the law enforcement that were on the scene. But this is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies," she said. "We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country, once and for all. ... It doesn't have to be this way."

Kris Brown is the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after James Brady, the former press secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Brady was shot in the head during the attempted assassination of Reagan. Brady survived, and went on with his wife Sarah to campaign for gun control.

"Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that the assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period," Kris Brown said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the Apalachee shooting.

Brown is optimistic that positive change is possible, despite the entrenched power of the gun lobby:

"There is a growing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country," she said, "including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority."

These weapons of war, marketed to U.S. consumers as benign "modern sporting rifles," need to be banned.

Assault weapons bans can work. A 1996 mass shooting in Australia left 35 dead and 23 injured. Almost immediately, that nation of gun lovers passed an assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback law. There hasn't been a shooting anywhere near that scale there since.

Success won't be so swift here in the U.S., a nation awash with hundreds of millions of guns. Still, the Harris/Walz campaign should make an assault weapons ban a central demand and take it to the voters in November. The lives of our nation's children depend on it.

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Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller "Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America."

(c) 2024 Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Distributed by King Features Syndicate