Words matter when we talk about mass shootings.
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But stricter background checks must be required for gun purchases, and people who clearly should not have access to deadly weapons should be prevented from buying them.
First, let’s forget the notion that we can somehow get rid of guns in America like they’ve essentially done in most of Western Europe. “President Obama used it not as a moment to inform or calm the American people; rather, he exploited it to push his gun control agenda”, National Rifle Association executive director Chris Cox said in a statement.
And if driving a auto – an activity that also kills far too many Americans – requires months of training, and an ongoing licensing and registration, then there is no reason we can’t require something similar for guns. How many more innocent people have to die, how many bright lives will be destroyed, how many more families will forever grieve before an overwhelming tide of support occurs to make change? They limited mass shootings to incidents where an individual – or in rare circumstances, more than one – “kills four or more people in a single incident (not including the shooter), typically in a single location”. When the shooting Wednesday at a San Bernardino County holiday party was over, 14 were dead and 21 injured. “Besides the irrefutable logic of tracking mass shootings this way, another benefit is that it removes medical care (which affects the outcome) from the action (shooting a bunch of people)”, a post on the site reads.
“These folks only want to think and pray – the NRA pays them to only think and pray about gun violence and not to do anything else about it”, Igor Volsky, a blogger with ThinkProgress, told MSNBC.
Female involvement is particularly rare, with 98% of mass shootings carried out by male gunmen.
The FBI found only 160 “active shooter incidents” between 2000 and 2013, when gang-related shootings were excepted, but those where nobody was shot or killed were included. The shootings have taken place in 47 separate states.
Fourteen people were shot to death near a centre for people with developmental disabilities in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday. American by birth, with no criminal record, he would have passed background checks. None of the federal or state legislation you guys propose would stop a future mass shooting, short of collecting all the guns.
“I never thought I was going to be a part of it”, Rivas said.
SE: Well, as you point out, there have been hundreds of mass shootings this year. We’ve seen stricter gun laws have a big impact on mass shootings.
While the polarization surrounding the gun control debate has made political solutions hard to attain, others also argue there are areas where progress can be made.
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A study by the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University documents a threefold rise in mass shootings in the United States since 2011, leaving some experts to wonder whether the attention paid to each incident only encouraged copycats. “There are no easy answers, of course”, Cagle wrote at the time.
