I apologize if the title is misleading…..we do have the occasional shooting between individuals or some shoot out with the police but we have not had many mass shootings but that came to an end.
Last weekend students from the sleepy little town of Bay St. Louis in Hancock county…..it was an after prom party and all student from local schools were invited to come and hang out.
The party was going well and all seemed to be enjoying themselves and the a 19 year old showed up to confront a student about his sister….the argument got heated and the 19 year old got a gun and shot and killed 2 and wounded 4….the shooter was tracked down and arrested.
All that made me think about the shooting after something I read in VOX.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm.
“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.
https://www.vox.com/23142734/cleveland-texas-mass-shootings
I am not trying to convince people that more gun control is needed….all this is just to try and explain how we got to this point in our history.
My thoughts are on record here on IST…..I will not convince you to my way of thinking as your efforts to do so for me are also wasted efforts.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 
The US is, indeed, a unloving country and those statistics bear that out sadly.
We need to return to the days when our neighbors were important to us. chuq
Gun violence is permanently etched into the DNA of America now and there is no turning back without a major overhaul in our lackadaisical disinterested impotent government.
John you may like this interesting story…..https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/03/the-idolatry-of-gun-worship/ enjoy chuq
High income country? That’s funny.
It is never going to end, only get worse. America will have to live with that far into the future. History will look back on it, and suppose that every American must have been insane or indoctrinated.
Best wishes, Pete.
You may like this story……https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/03/the-idolatry-of-gun-worship/ chuq
Thanks for the link, chuq.
My pleasure chuq
The CP article was far more about Christian Nationalism than gun Rights/control. As it only identified a couple of tenuous commercial linkages, I didn’t really find it compelling. That’s all I’ll say about it.