In fact, this year, there have been more mass shootings – defined as incidents in which four or more victims are shot – than days in the calendar year, NBC News reported.
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Mass shootings such as the one Wednesday in San Bernardino, California, often produce initial reports of multiple gunmen, likely owing to the confusion and chaos that immediately follow gunfire.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also offered his prayers on Twitter for those “impacted by the shooting in California”. “Last year, overall mass shootings weren’t increasing that much”, he said.
“Some argue for stricter gun laws, others say we should focus on mental health issues, some point to a culture that celebrates violence”. The effort began at the Guns Are Cool subreddit, an ironically named group of gun-control proponents who share articles about shootings in the United States.
Some observers, such as independent researcher and gun-rights proponent John Lott, object to the tracker’s methodology because it counts “a lot of shootings where people aren’t killed, criminal gangs are involved, and cases take place out of public view”.
Malik and Farook opened fire on a holiday banquet of Farook’s co-workers and then died in a shootout with police Wednesday.
Regardless of the cause, “four people are still dead”, he said in an interview. The data considers any shooting with four or more victims a “mass shooting”. Half of all victims were women.
In Wednesday’s episode, two of the attackers were killed by police, and a third suspect was taken into custody. “That encourages people who want to go out in a blaze of glory”.
Mass shootings are becoming an almost-everyday occurrence in this country. “Fear is running rampant”, criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University said in an e-mail.
Many people in Kentuckiana on Thursday said the news of yet another mass shooting, sadly, came as no surprise.
While the numbers shift from year to year, there has been no discernible trend either in the numbers or in the characteristics of the assailants, said Fox, who is also a co-author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder”. “A lot of that has been because of the nature of media coverage”.
Renewed calls for more gun control surfaced in Louisville and across the nation in the hours following the shooting.
“This is looking more and more like self-radicalization”, a law enforcement official said.
This mass shooting and several recent others have some local residents anxious, questioning, ‘is this the new norm?’ “Oftentimes the person is socially isolated and not socially successful, and that creates a situation in which you are on your own and it’s hard to get others to buy into your vision or anger”.
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Fifty times more Americans have been killed by guns than terrorist attacks since 9/11, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Global Terrorism Database says. One of them, Nicholas Thalasinos, liked to discuss religion and politics. “You have personal motivations, political motivations, religious motivations, criminal motivations, or just no motivations at all, as the shooter acts out their fantasies”. “They planned that out very thoroughly, I would make a connection to that”.
