The recent murder of a journalist and her cameraman, on live television, brings up the numbing feeling of déjà vu in this country. Mass shootings, the threat of mass shootings, and the constant reminders of earlier mass shootings permeate our country's public sphere. A crowdsourced Mass Shooter Tracker logs all mass shootings around the country.
August 26 is the 238th day of the year. And with the fatal shooting in Virginia today -- in which a gunman shot himself after killing two reporters and wounding one more person -- plus the shooting of four during a Minneapolis home invasion, the number of mass shooting incidents has risen to 247 for the year.
Just a month ago we were at an average of one mass shooting per day. The Mass Shooting Tracker defines the term "mass shooting" a little broader than the FBI. They believe not everyone has to die in a mass shooting event for it to reach that premium status. Gun rights people bristle at the liberty of this definition:
Some gun rights advocates -- like John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center -- object that the broader definition includes a lot of gang killings and domestic disputes that the average person wouldn't necessarily consider a "mass shooting." But there's an uncomfortable assumption here that some crime victims' lives should be valued differently -- or are less worthy of attention -- than others.
It's not an uncomfortable assumption, it's racism and sexism. It's the kind of thinking that makes people say all of the people dying on the streets of Baltimore and Chicago somehow are violent by nature—they're animals. The numbers don't lie. We have a terrible gun problem in our country and the correlation between gun ownership and gun violence is clear to everyone but ourselves.
how many deaf ears will this fall on more important how many not deaf ears will hear it and than dismiss it those who have the power to instigate change have not been hit with American voices that care about lives, some feign caring of tissue but not a child born those people are not the so called minorities which keeps bringing me back to the title of Joan Walsh's book "WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE"???????? these mass murders are happening to their people i understood when it was just people of color but they don't care about their own children in favor of a gun?????????????????????????????
