Country endured 28 mass killings – a total of 140 victims – amid uptick in gun violence and calls by some for stricter laws. Police officers walking down street,
The United States saw a record of 28 mass killings in the first half of 2023, The Associated Press has reported, as policymakers struggle to curb gun violence across the country.
The AP analysis, published on Friday, said 140 victims were killed during that period. All but one of the mass killings – incidents in which four or more people are slain not including the perpetrator – involved firearms.
“What a ghastly milestone,” Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville in March when a former student fatally shot six people, told the AP. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”
This also doesn’t paint the whole picture.
The term mass shooting is being used for a broader range of incidents, whereas before it typically referred to a lone gunman shooting innocents, now every drive by or gang turf war is getting the label.
This is purposefully conflating multiple types of violence to befuddle folks into thinking there’s a terrorist attack on children every weekend.
This muddies the water, successfully so, for the gun control movement to gain momentum and advocate for things like assault weapon bans, which are typically used in historical mass shootings, but are rarely ever used in the majority of the “4 or more” definition of mass shooting.
Problem here is that if you don’t separate and properly label the incidents, you can’t address the problem.
As an example, what would an assault weapon ban do for gang related deaths when most of those happen with hand guns? What if instead we decriminalized or legalized the drugs that typically drive the violence?
These conversations can’t happen if everything is a “mass shooting”, and that’s the point.