Tragedy after tragedy: January brought scores of shootings across the United States

There was a mass shooting near a youth center in Allentown, Pennsylvania and a Subway restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. Another took place behind a brewery in Oklahoma City and another in a strip club outside Columbus, Ohio. Two mass shootings they ended up with parties in several Florida cities.

Y that was just new years eve.

By the beginning of the fourth week of January, the count had grown to include at least 39 separate shootings in which four or more people were injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence File, which describes a shocking explosion of violence on several sites. in nearly every corner of the nation it has killed at least 69 people.

The deadliest shooting to date occurred over the weekend in Monterey Park, California, a city with a thriving Asian-American community, where a gunman killed 11 and injured nine others inside a popular ballroom. . Authorities said the killer, who may have attacked his victims and then committed suicide, he was a 72-year-old man.

Then another deadly mass shooting took place in California on Monday. A gunman, who according to authorities was a 67-year-old man, killed seven people and seriously injured at least one other person in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco.

“At the hospital meeting with victims of a mass shooting, when I was pulled aside to inquire about another shooting,” California Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted on Monday. “Tragedy upon tragedy”.

From offices to restaurants

The frequency of mass shootings and the variety of locations where they now occur (offices and schools, beauty salons and places of worship, grocery stores and restaurants) it contributes to the feeling, prevalent throughout the United States, that such violence could break out at any time, anywhere.

It fuels gun control calls as confidently as it does buying more and more guns. Public shootings fascinate the nationbut they can also have the effect of normalize violence.

Criminologists say the prevalence of mass shootings is due in part to the easy access to so many guns, a unique feature of the United States, as well as the imitation effect.

“Would someone like that have committed a mass shooting in a ballroom in the past?” says Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, referring to the older man believed to have been the shooter in Monterey Park. . “Maybe not. You can think of it as a snowball effect. The more incidents there are, the more important this option will be in the minds of angry people.”

At the same time, the recurrence of such gun violence it risks having the effect of numbing the nation to tragedy, so much so that warnings about not getting used to high-profile mass shootings are a familiar part of the response.

“We cannot become numb to these horrific acts of violence,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said after the shooting in Monterey Park, which occurred during the Lunar New Year celebrations over the weekend. “The Year of the Rabbit represents hope.”

There is little official consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting; different organizations use different measures. But so far this year, the vast majority of the 39 shootings in which at least four people were shot, the measure used by the Gun Violence Archive, a research group, attracted little or no attention beyond the areas in which they occurred.

Anyone outside of Houston would know that two such shootings took place this year: one shooting in which four people were injured; another that killed a person outside a Houston club and involved an AK-47-style assault rifle?

“Looks like more than 50 shots were fired here, which is a very scary situation,” local sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters.

Such shootings appear often on the evening newsbut they fail to penetrate the general consciousness of the cities in which they take place, even when they leave victims and bystanders with permanent wounds and mental scars.

“I was terrified, everyone was running,” said Carl Leon, a 25-year-old from Miami, describing the moment filming began outside a Miami Gardens restaurant earlier this month.

Leon, who promotes musicians on his Instagram account, had just finished appearing as an extra in a video shot for rapper French Montana, he said, and was reaching in his pocket for his keys when he was shot. A bullet went through his left arm and abdomen.

“I thought I was going to die”, She said. “It was the first time I was in a situation like this.”

But the Miami Gardens shooting wasn’t the first for her attorney, Josiah Graham, who was representing one of the survivors of a shooting on a Broward County bus last year that killed two people and injured two others.

It wasn’t even the first mass shooting in the city of Miami Gardens this year. Nine people were injured in a shooting at a party in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

“In the old days, if you stayed away from certain things, you were good,” said Shanta Bonius, the mother of Carlos Wilkerson, 23, one of 10 people shot and injured, including Leon, outside the restaurant in Miami Gardens.

“Today you could mind your own business, go shopping and something happens.”

The number of mass shootings has increased, though not steadily, since 2014, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks public reports of shootings. There were 690 shootings resulting in four or more fatalities in 2021, more than double the 2014 total. The number decreased slightly last year, to 647, but remained significantly higher than in previous years.

And the number of such shootings appears to be rising in the first few weeks of this year, compared to similar periods in recent years. There was, on average, fewer than one mass shooting per day from Jan. 1 to Jan. 23 in each of the past five years, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, but there has been an upward trend over the past two years. , to 28 last year from 26 in 2021 and 16 in 2018.

no safe place

“There is not anywhere in the US to be safe from gun violence,” California state senator David Min said in response to the Monterey Park shooting.

“This has to stop. That’s enough,” he said.

Despite falling crime rates, gun violence is on the rise, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the regional gun violence research consortium at the Rockefeller Institute for Government.

But Dr Schildkraut said it was important to distinguish between “public mass shootings” like those in Monterey Park, which are known for they are premeditatedand other categories, for example murders between relatives, shootings between gangs in retaliation or shooting resulting from a dispute.

Mass public shootings are the least common and the deadliest, She said. And the kinds of policy interventions that are most likely to prevent them differ.

“All the gun violence and the loss of a single individual is too much,” Ms Schildkraut said. “They’re different cubes that require us to think about their unique characteristics and add prevention and response layers accordingly.”

A 2015 study linked the nation’s high rate of mass shootings to its high rate of gun ownership. Americans make up about 5 percent of the world’s population and own 42 percent of weapons around the world, according to the study.

It is difficult to calculate the exact number of guns sold each year in the United States due to differing state laws and purchasing scenarios. But FBI data on the number of firearm background checks can serve as a measure. With that tally, that jumped to 40 million background checks in 2021 from 10 million in 2005.

But subsequent work suggests that the driving factor may be easy access to weaponsnot possession of them, said Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who wrote the 2015 study.

Nearly 40 percent of American men tell investigators they own a gun, so just gun ownership not a useful predictor which threatens to commit a mass shooting, Lankford said.

In a study of the 14 deadliest mass shootings since Columbine, he and a coauthor showed that half of the perpetrators hadn’t acquired their first firearm until the last year before the attack.

In many of the lesser-reported mass shootings that take place in the United States, information about the gunman and the weapon used is not readily known.

After 12 people were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend, three with what were described as life-threatening injuries, police pleaded for people with information to come forward with information about the killer.

In Rockford, Illinois, northwest of Chicago, three people were killed and two others injured in a shooting this month, and one suspect has yet to be publicly identified.

“You wish that equal attention was paid to these daily shootings,” Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said in an interview.

“I don’t want to sound insensitive in Monterey Park, but at least those people will be remembered,” he added. “Last year I lost 15 lives in my community. There was no national story about it. It is sad to live in a country where violence is normalized”.

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