In The New York Times, May 19, there was a graphic showing how many mass shootings there have been each month since January 2013. They defined mass shooting as a single event in which 4 or more people are injured or killed.
I was shocked. The lowest number of mass shootings in a month was 11; the highest 49. That’s a total of 1713 mass shootings in 65 months, for an average of 27 per month. And remember, these are not the number of people injured or killed, but the number of events.
I had no idea there were so many. I read The New York Times regularly and look at the news online most days. Yet I was only aware of a small fraction of these mass shootings. It would appear that unless a mass shooting reaches a threshold of a certain number of people injured or killed the event doesn’t make it into the national media and is just reported locally.
How can we expect a massive public movement to demand more effective gun control measures and the legislatures to respond when the scope of the problem is so underreported? The ones reported in the national media have been terrible, and there have been enough of them. But it still felt like these were unusual occurrences. Not so!
But now that we have that knowledge, how can any parent, how can any gun owner, not say, “This cannot continue. Congress must pass broadened gun control measures to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have access to guns.”? All loopholes should be eliminated. All purchases must be approved. And the law should be changed so that in cases like the most recent shooting in Texas, where the student got the guns from his father’s collection, the owner of the gun should be held criminally liable as an accessory to the murders unless the gun was locked in a gun safe
The facts revealed in the Times should be the lead story in every newspaper in the country and on every cable news program. This is more immediately vital to our security and well-being than anything else going on in the world.
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