There is still a week left in January and there have already been 39 mass shootings in America, defined as an incident where four or more people (not including the shooter) have been killed with a gun. The Washington Post reports that “less than a month into 2023, mass shootings have already killed 70 people and injured 167 this year in America.”

This is indeed a higher than normal number. It appears the rate of mass shootings shot up in 2020 and has not returned to the former baseline, which was already extremely high by global standards. Of course 2020 brought America the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic disruption, and it was also a presidential election year. Whatever the causes, things got worse in 2021 and remained at nearly the same number in 2022.

The Biden administration wants to reenact the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban, but with the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, there’s no chance that Congress will attempt to address gun violence this year or next.

This is movement on the state level, however. But only in states with the Democratic governors and Democratic legislatures.

Illinois has become the ninth state in the United States to ban the sale of assault weapons, a move hailed by the administration of President Joe Biden, who called on other states to pass similar bans.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “commends the leadership” of Illinois’s governor and legislators. The ban was passed by the state Senate on Monday, with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signing the bill into law the next day.

Jean-Pierre said that Biden has “continued to press for more action to keep our homes, schools and communities safe, including federal laws requiring background checks for all gun sales and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”.

“In the meantime, the president continues to urge other states to join California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, Washington, DC and now Illinois to ban assault weapons at the state level to save lives.”

The conservative Supreme Court of the United States stands ready and willing to strike down this kind of legislation, which is already watered down in an effort to avoid such a fate.

The Biden administration has issued plenty of executive actions in an effort to combat gun violence, and signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun safety bill in June 2022, when the Democrats still had complete control of Congress.

Hopefully these measures will begin to have a positive effect over time, but it’s clear that more needs to be done if we’re going to become a normal nation with a typical level of gun violence.

I honestly believe that we are rewarding people too much for causing division and hatred, especially through disinformation. Donald Trump is the absolute king of this and the role model and trend setter for a whole generation of grifters and operatives. If this trend slowed and began to reverse, I think we’d see the frequency of mass shootings slow and reverse, too. Not every safety measure necessarily has to address the weapons used. Lowering the heat of our political discourse could be even more effective. But that’s a very hard thing to tackle without coming up against business freedoms and constitutional rights.

It’s annoying when people offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings, but there is something to be said for some kind of spiritual awakening on the issue. After all, when the status quo is locked in place for countless reasons and you can’t realistically expect any near-term political solution, then maybe trying to change people’s hearts is better than more of the same.