“We don’t have to accept it (and I don’t), but it’s been completely normalized in our society. Could you imagine if we had small bombs going off at least once daily?”
Sadly true. Over 5 years ago when kindergarten students were mowed down and nothing at all changed.
Seems like the focus shouldn’t be on immigrants being the danger when it is repeatedly white male citizens causing death and heartache in this country.
This thread has the potential to spiral out of control at any minute. I do not live in the area, thought I know it since my daughter and her bf know people who are interning with the paper and also the Baltimore sun ( both student and recent grad from local university )
This is NOT normal , nor should it be seen as such.
It once again appears to be the act of a person suffering from mental illness , which is tragically a common denominater when it comes to mass shootings in the USA ( which are NOT a daily occurrence )
The shooter lost his defamation suit against the paper because he could not prove that anything the paper printed wasn’t true. The paper’s story was accurate.
With 195 mass shootings so far this year, that’s, on average, more than a daily occurrence.
Shootings are too common, they are wrong, and we should be doing more to prevent them. I won’t get into parsing the terms “normal” and “abnormal” and “not normal.”
very interesting, tomSr.
I vividly Remember one of the first of these because we lived in Edmond , OKat the ltime. “Going Postal” , The crazy white guy with Nothing political but personal revenge.
So how long do we let them have guns?
Today was I-Day (induction) at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Parents were dropping off their sons and daughters to start their military journeys. At the end of the parent briefing, the superintendent announced that a shooting had occurred near the mall, no word on casualties but that all on the Yard were safe. He mentioned it again at the swearing-in ceremony, updating that deaths were reported. These parents were already dealing with their children’s choice to potentially put themselves into harms way some day through military duty. Drop-off day is sobering enough without being faced yet again with homeland dangers we can’t seem to control.
Later, someone posted that they received this from their USNA Parents Club:
A sad day for all directly involved. Another sad day for us as a country as the shooting toll rises and we struggle to find a solution.
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=psc_working_papers indicates that Navy personnel in the Iraq area in 2003-2006 actually had a lower death rate than US civilian men age 20-34 (table 1 and 2). However, service in the Marines was much more dangerous.
Of course, every conflict is different (Iraq did not feature enemy forces that could attack Navy ships). But it is not necessarily a given that service in the Navy is more dangerous than civilian life in the US. Perhaps that is a commentary that civilian life in the US is more dangerous than it should be.
The figure of 195 mass shootings this year alone cited above (twice) is obviously completely false.
This website:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/
Says:
Which is 54%. Obviously mass shootings are overwhelmingly done by men, but not disproportionately by white men.
With a mass shooting defined as 4 murdered or injured, the total number of mass shootings for the year 2018 is 154 according to the following source. If you scroll all the way to the right, links are provided for each shooting.
Again one wonders how a person convicted of assault is able to own a gun.
My son is a journalist. He usually works in a newsroom. He and his colleagues have high ethical and professional standards.
IMNSHO, anyone who doesn’t think that the constant attacks on the integrity and human worth of public servants, journalists, ethnic groups, and others contributes to the propensity of the unbalanced to go after strangers with a gun is deluding themselves. And that applies to the attacks on congresspeople playing softball and Gabby Gifford as much as this, as well as some whack job showing up at a DC pizzeria looking for a mythical crime ring.
Mass shootings aren’t just the big ones that make national headlines.
My neighbor posted this on FB last night. I think he aptly captures what so many of my community are feeling this morning (he gave permission to share). “Annapolis is a small town. The Capital is our newspaper. These reporters, editors, advertising account execs, admins…they are all our friends and neighbors. They are not pawns for political arguments on Twitter for ideologues who don’t know their names or anything about them. They are not “The Media”…a phrase spit out with hatred at presidential rallies, only to be followed by boos, hisses, and threats. They are not “The Elite”. They don’t have agendas. They are reporters who cover city council budget meetings until 3am, or photogs who cover endless lacrosse games in the rain, or editors who pore over articles to post online only to be shredded by trolls in the comments section. What is a national tragedy today, will disappear from the blazingly-fast news cycle tomorrow because the president tweeted something outrageous while watching Fox & Friends, but Annapolis will take years to recover from this. And it takes something like this to make me realize that every community who is traumatized like this takes years to recover, but we are trained by cable news and social media to bounce from tragedy to tragedy with a forced sympathy that completely ignores the fact that these are real people with real families who are part of a community.”
Normally, today, the front page of The Capital would be photos and stories about “I” Day at the Naval Academy - pictures of kids get their hair shaved off, parents hugging their sons and daughters goodbye as they begin plebe summer, weeks long grueling training that prepares them for the next four years. Instead we have a headline of yet another shooting, except this time here. Where I live. The opinion page today was mostly blank with just the words “we are speechless” and a list of the names of the victims.
It is what was reported on the NBC national news. The definition of mass shooting varies depending on the website that compiles the data. In any case, if it’s ‘only’ 154, is that really any better? Downplaying the severity of the problem in the U.S. isn’t the ideal response.
When someone cites a figure for mass shootings this year, they should also cite the definition of mass shooting being used. If you definition is “Four dead,” you’ll get a different number than if your definition is “Four dead or wounded.”
IMO, “only” 154 mass shootings this year is horrible.
Only in America would people quibble about it being 1 mass shooting a day or 1.2 mass shootings a day.
You know how many mass shootings a day the rest of the developed world has? Me neither because they count them in the single digits each YEAR.
I’m sorry, I misspoke above. Ramos was convicted of harrasment, not assault.
Or decade.
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I think we can move past arguing about the number of mass shootings. Also, let’s not go down the rabbit hole of debating treatment for mental illness.