In US, 204 mass shootings in 204 days should make lawmakers cringe with shame
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A website that tracks mass shootings in the US had logged 203 through Wednesday. It hasn’t caught up with last night’s rampage in a Louisiana theater, but when it does, that will be No. 204—and yesterday was the 204th day of the year, the worst kind of synchronicity, notes the Washington Post.
The Mass Shooting Tracker is a crowd-sourced tool from an anti-gun forum at Reddit called Guns Are Cool, and it defines “mass shooting” as incident in which at least four people were shot. Not all of the incidents resulted in deaths.
A post at Quartz digs in a little deeper to the numbers and finds that 40 of 50 states have had at least one such mass shooting this year, with New York (16), California (14), Florida (14), Texas (12), and Georgia (12) at the top of the list.
In its coverage, the Post quotes a barb from the Economist, written after the Charleston church massacre, that has been in wide circulation of late: “Those who live in America, or visit it, might do best to regard [mass shootings] the way one regards air pollution in China: an endemic local health hazard which, for deep-rooted cultural, social, economic and political reasons, the country is incapable of addressing.
This may, however, be a bit unfair. China seems to be making progress on pollution.”
Edited from Newser
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Obama, whilst being interviewed by the BBC, pointed out that more Americans had died since 9/11 from shooting incidents in America than had died from any other cause including terrorism.
Hello! Gun lobby! Wakey Wakey!!
Oh what do I know eh? I’m just a dumb Brit…
That’s very true Norman. America has become an armed camp, and the laughing stock of the rest of the civilized world.
I’d expect a bit of slant in the figures, considering the source, but although I would truly like to see a breakdown. How many were like the theater shooting, how many were drive-by shootings – how many were bystanders, how many were targets, etc. etc. Perhaps the approach to different circumstances should be different. What are we doing to combat the armed gang violence we’re seeing as the gangs take root in new areas? How are we encouraging — demanding that health care professionals report people under their care. Not all gun control directly concerns guns and I’d suggest a more holistic approach. I see too many vague calls for more laws without much consideration to what they say and how they might be enforced.
That’s an interesting quote from the Economist for the same reason. Indeed such things can be local with different social, economic and cultural differences and shouldn’t be lumped together the way some reporters do: treating suicides, robberies, gang violence and psychotic rampages the same but one question seems to be chronically ignored: how much is due to non-enforcement, non-reporting or poor enforcement of laws already on the books? How much gun violence is the result of increased criminal enterprise and what can we do to make these things less profitable and less possible? I sometimes think we’re trying to put band aids on symptoms and ignoring the disease. I sometimes think we thwart our own intentions by harping on various fixed ideas to the exclusion of others.
The South Carolina shooter should have flunked a background test but someone bungled it. This sort of thing happens far too often.