Nearly 1 mass shooting a day since Sandy Hook
MASS SHOOTINGS are now a part of the fabric of America.
Since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the U.S. has seen 1,518 acts of gun violence in which at least four people were wounded or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive website. That’s nearly one mass shooting a day for the 1,754 days since the shocking slaughter of the Connecticut kids.
The crimes claimed the lives of 1,715 people and wounded more than 6,000 others — all while Congress has failed to enact a single piece of significant gun legislation.
“It’s truly hard to understand how they live with themselves,” Abbey Clements, a former Sandy Hook teacher who survived the attack that killed 20 children and six staffers, said of lawmakers who resist stricter gun laws.
“How do you vote against common sense measures that could save lives? I don’t know how they look themselves in the mirror.”
The Gun Violence Archive noted a steady uptick in the number of shootings that killed or wounded at least four people since the end of 2012.
The number of attacks totaled 253 in 2013, 274 in 2014, 333 in 2015 and 383 in 2016. The U.S. has recorded 273 such incidents so far this year, resulting in 11,686 deaths and 23,717 wounded victims.
“We thought after Sandy Hook and certainly after Orlando there would be action, but there has been nothing but thoughts and prayers,” said Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive. “That doesn't really cut it.”
President Trump said on Tuesday, “We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.”
That statement came two days after Stephen Paddock, 64, shot and killed at least 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip.
Bryant, a former systems architect at IBM and Microsoft, launched the online site in the wake of the Sandy Hook rampage in the hope that it would lead to stiffer gun laws.
“I figured that I had one good job left in me, and we wanted to do one that counted — both figuratively and literally,” Bryant, 62, said.
The definition of mass shooting varies among criminologists, leading to different opinions on whether they are in fact on the rise.
Grant Duwe, a criminologist and author of “Mass Murder in the United States,” counts as a mass shooting any incident that results in the deaths of at least four victims. These can include domestic killings that take place inside a home, drug deals gone bad and gang violence.
By that definition, the rate has remained relatively steady in recent years.
Duwe noted that the rate of mass public shootings has also fluctuated little over the past decade. But they have changed in one important way — the lethality.
“Mass public shootings have become more deadly,” said Duwe. “It’s the increase in the severity over the last decade that more than anything has contributed to this perception that they have become more routine.”
The killings have so stained the fabric of the U.S. that they are often referred to simply by their locations — Aurora, Orlando, San Bernardino.
The fallout from the massacres has followed a familiar and sad script. Several Democratic lawmakers call for stricter gun laws while the calls from the vast majority of their Republican counterparts rarely extend beyond prayers.
Many gun control advocates predicted that the Sandy Hook rampage would prove the turning point in the years-long crusade to enact such legislation as universal background checks and bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
But experts say the wealth and power of the National Rifle Association has bullied lawmakers into staying silent on the issue.
Po Murray, the chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, decried the number of politicians, including President Trump, whom she sees as being “bought by the NRA.”
“Until we flip Congress and get a leader in the White House who will wrap their arms around gun violence prevention, we will continue to have these mass shootings and 100,000 killed or injured by guns each year,” Murray said.