Yesterday’s Other Mass Shooting

There have been more than 352 mass shooting incidents in the U.S.in 2015, including the slaughter in San Bernardino Wednesday.

But it is shocking to learn the number of mass shootings has been rapidly escalating this year.

The FBI condemns someone as a mass murderer if they killed four or more people during one single event or more events. Another mass shooting incident in Boston in the early hours of Thanksgiving Day took the life of a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority rail conductor. The source of the panic rests squarely with the way in which media outlets cover these tragedies, and in this case, the Mass Shooting Tracker that is attracting so much ink.

According to their website, Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as, “four or more people shot in a spree or setting”. One woman died and three men were injured. By that count, the last mass shooting was just over a week ago, when a gunman in Columbus, Ohio, killed a couple, the couple’s seven-year-old son, and himself, injuring one other.

The FBI used to consider someone a “mass murderer” if theykilled four or more people during one event, regardless of weapons used.

“It’s really shameful that Congress has refused to do anything on gun violence prevention in light of the horrific shootings we keep having in this country, and the fact that the public overwhelmingly wants Congress to do something about this”, said Juliet Leftwich, legal director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in a recent interview with NBC Bay Area. Using these definitions, Grant Duwe, in his 2007 book Mass Murder in the United States: A History, notes: “Excluding those that occurred in connection with criminal activity such as robbery, drug dealing, and organized crime, there were 116 mass public shootings during the twentieth century” (emphasis mine).

We still have a month to go. Research from Harvard suggests that about 40 per cent of guns in the U.S. are acquired without a background check, while it is legal even for people on the terrorism watch list to buy guns – more than 2,000 terrorism suspects purchased guns in the USA between 2004 and 2014. Last year, overall mass shootings weren’t increasing that much, he said.

“Circumstances leading to this shooting remain under investigation”. Heyward, Myers and Washington had non-life threatening wounds, police said. And since 57 percent of mass shootings involve an intimate partner or family member, we should expand the laws prohibiting convicted domestic abusers from possessing firearms.