A lone gunman walked onto a high school campus outside of Portland, Ore., Tuesday morning and shot down a student before taking his own life. Last week, a similar event unfolded at Seattle Pacific University. Another shooting occurred days earlier at an elementary school in Wisconsin.
It’s time to face facts: Our nation is at war with itself when every few days someone walks into a public place armed with a gun and indiscriminately kills, motivated by some warped desperation.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, has kept a running tally of campus shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre that left 20 little children and six adults dead. The total: 74.
Counting only the school weeks in session, that’s 1.37 campus shootings a week over the past 18 months. And it doesn’t even count mass shootings at malls, work places or other common areas. It doesn’t include the shooting and stabbings by Elliot Rodgers that left six dead last month near U.C. Santa Barbara or the cop-killing spree by a deranged Cliven Bundy-loving couple in Las Vegas this week.
No other country in the world has a school-shooting or random mass shooting scourge of this magnitude. Not even close.
Every time—every week, actually—the media train their eye on the killers, who increasingly leave behind dark confessions on social media, and we wonder how these things happen and what we can do stop them.
The answer can’t continue to be some trite cliche about only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. There’s too many bad guys. And too many guns.
note: this is the 74th school shooting. Not shooting in general, of course, but school shooting. Since December 2012.
I’m not a math guy, but I think that comes out very nearly to once a week.
So, yeah, people lets continue to let the NRA tell us that what we don’t need is any sensible gun control..
There were 24 shootings in Chicago alone two weeks ago, and Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the USA.
There are 99,000 public K-12 schools in the USA. There are
To account for these school shootings, I wonder:
Are there more schools? I think not.
Are there more guns? Doubtful.
Are there more weird students? Not likely.
What has increased dramatically are three things: the news coverage of these tragedies, addiction to violent video games, and the number of young people taking powerful psych drugs. Today’s shooters are guaranteed not only infamy but nationwide broadcast of their hardships and sufferings, real and imagined. The tragedy of their decision-making process (typically more speculation than fact), along with the methodical, game-like quality of their cowardly murder spree, is transmitted for days on end into the homes and thoughts of every deluded and depressed, would-be mass murderer in the country. “Take another pill, Junior, and shuffle off to your room like a good boy.”
Ironically, the same media that is so eager to be first with mass shooting details it regularly gets wrong the firearms involved never seems to get around to mentioning the role of psych drugs in explaining otherwise inexplicable behavior. This despite the shooter’s typical zombie-like appearance, lifelong passivity, and the well-known connection between many of these “medications” and the sudden onset of suicidal thoughts and behavior. A cynic might suspect a connection between media’s disinterest in the drug angle and Big Pharm’s very big annual advertising budget.
Satan is getting a hold on our children. We need to get back to the Bible, and raise a stronghold in the minds and hearts of our children in Jesus Christ. They are hurting and broken in this chaotic society and satan is picking up the pieces through destruction.
My post wasn’t finished.
In addition to the 99,000 K-12 public schools in the USA, there are about 34, 000 private K-12 schools in the USA. There are &,021 Title IV schools in the country, and 7480 post high school institutions in the USA. That’s almost 149,000 educational institutions in the USA. Source–funfacts website.
Of course, every such death is a tragedy for the friends and families of the victims. However, In the context of 149,000 schools, 74 school shootings by occasional nutballs does not seem such a large number to be used to justify the faux outrage expressed by many in order to “justify” keeping guns from the law-abiding, sane majority.
Well there you have it, still plenty of people not being shot.
I randomly investigated 10 of those 74 “school shootings” and nine of them clearly were nothing at all like what people think about when they hear “school shooting.” Here is the list. You can see for yourself: http://flackops.blogspot.com/2014/06/gunsmoke-and-mirrors-have-there-really.html
Being a progressive is all about searching for the next crisis.
And if they can’t find one they’ll make one up.
Sorry, but Bloomberg’s group has grossly padded their numbers as reported here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/school-shootings-cnn-number/index.html
and here:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/11/cnn-slashes-school-shooting-stats-claim-by-80-percent/
Furthermore, focusing on situations such as this as anecdotal support for stricter gun control laws – or in more extreme circumstances, national firearm confiscation – tells a negligently incomplete picture of firearm ownership and use in America. Speaking to the issue of defensive gun use in America vs. firearm deaths, a CDC report commissioned by Obama released these findings:
“The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released the results of their research through the CDC last month. Researchers compiled data from previous studies in order to guide future research on gun violence, noting that “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”
“Most felons report obtaining the majority of their firearms from informal sources,” adds the report, while “stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals.”
Researchers also found that the majority of firearm deaths are from suicide, not homicide. “Between the years 2000 and 2010, firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearm-related violence in the United States.”
Furthermore, to date, the the most deadly act of school violence occurred back in 1927, the Bath School Disaster. Andrew Kehoe, the school treasurer murdered his wife and blew up his home and its associated farm buildings. Simultaneously with that explosion, another occurred at the school. Hundreds of pounds of dynamite and incendiaries were detonated by a timer, all of which Mr. Kehoe had secreted under the school. 36 children and 2 teachers were killed. The disaster would have been far worse had the additional 500 lbs of explosives also hidden under the school had detonated as well.
So, too, would the Columbine Shooting have also been far worse if Klebold and Harris had also detonated the explosives they were carrying with them. When murdering degenerates start to figure out that incendiaries and explosives – and chemical weapons, for that matter – are easier to manufacture than firearms are to obtain – at least in states like California, we will start to see body counts skyrocket. The clamoring for increased gun control measures never manage to address the underlying causes of school violence – or any kind of violence, for that matter: Sociopathy, Mental Illness, etc. Only when those problems begin to be addressed will we see a reduction in violence in our society.