Every mass shooting in the US since 2014
December 28, 2021 1:10 PM   Subscribe

 
Feel free to skip this if you are not up for a downer today or any other day.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:10 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I always see things like this and think, "this is so powerful, it just has to affect people who feel differently about gun violence than me."

And then my mind immediately goes back to Sandy Hook, and I get incredibly depressed.
posted by knownassociate at 1:27 PM on December 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


Now do knives. Because this is a "real" argument from the gun enthusiasts that I have heard many times. Mass killing by knives, is it an equivalent threat or not? Also please present the data in a form that the very stupid can understand.
posted by sophrontic at 1:36 PM on December 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


Car accidents do not invalidate gun murders.
posted by fnerg at 1:54 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


5 dead after officer kills family in Spanish Fork , Jan 17, 2014

How do we talk about this topic? The school/mall/disco mass shootings are unspeakable, but it seems a oddly (something I don't have a word) to conflate the equally horrific yet different cases of a family murder suicide. I'd just googled this one as it seemed like it would be a quicker search than a big city. I don't have anything but just adding up every example of instances of greater than 3 does not illuminate. A family of 3 doesn't count?
posted by sammyo at 1:55 PM on December 28, 2021


OMG, BECAUSE COVID EXISTS, WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO THINK ABOUT FOOD POISONING! WE CAN ONLY DEAL WITH ONE POSSIBLE SOURCE OF DANGER AT A TIME!
posted by fnerg at 1:56 PM on December 28, 2021


> now do cars

You tried this kind of false equivalence last month, and didn't bother to engage any further with counterarguments. It did not go over very well.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:57 PM on December 28, 2021 [24 favorites]


fnerg, you're misunderstanding. As sophrontic notes, "what about deaths from [X]" is a fairly common tactic from gun enthusiasts used to derail any discussion of gun violence, as it has unfortunately seemed to have done here.

OMG, BECAUSE COVID EXISTS, WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO THINK ABOUT FOOD POISONING! WE CAN ONLY DEAL WITH ONE POSSIBLE SOURCE OF DANGER AT A TIME!

Ironically it's also a common tactic in Covid discussions: "[other disease/ailment] kills so many more people per year, who cares about Covid" talking points have been espoused by conservatives to downplay or discredit the dangers of Covid since the pandemic began.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:01 PM on December 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


I'm not sure who this "visual database" is for. It's a worse reference than the source material. You can't click on anything to get more information. It strikes me as a pretty poor way to present the information.
posted by demiurge at 2:25 PM on December 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


I kind of like how it makes you scroll forever, and doesn't let three people dead / two injured become a stat you can just skim past.

The slightly different icons for each dead person is a nice touch too. Each dead or injured person is a human being.
posted by subdee at 2:28 PM on December 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


There was a similar graphic for people who'd died in drone strikes in Pakistan, that was also pretty powerful from what I remember.
posted by subdee at 2:31 PM on December 28, 2021


I remember looking at the Wikipedia page for List of mass shootings in the United States, thinking "oh that is a lot", but then realizing that every year has its own detailed page and then it is completely overwhelming.
posted by meowzilla at 2:31 PM on December 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


The number this month alone is sobering.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:46 PM on December 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Exactly two-fifths of the states have not had mass shootings (by the article's definition) this year:

Alaska
Arkansas
Connecticut
Delaware
Hawaii
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas
Maine
Massachusetts
Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New Mexico
North Dakota
Rhode Island
Vermont
West Virginia
Wyoming

And the District of Columbia.
posted by bryon at 3:08 PM on December 28, 2021


Exactly two-fifths of the states have not had mass shootings (by the article's definition) this year


I didn't notice the others, but the article lists one for DC on Oct 21.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:49 PM on December 28, 2021


^ Oct. 21 has shootings for Tacoma, WA, and Brooklyn, NY.
posted by bryon at 3:54 PM on December 28, 2021


And then my mind immediately goes back to Sandy Hook, and I get incredibly depressed.

Sandy Hook was when I finally understood that the US was never going to do anything about school shootings, the role that gun availability plays in them, or the many other deaths, by accident or by murder-suicide, as sammyo mentions above.

It's a sad realization that there are powerful people for whom no number of deaths, not even of small children, is more important than ownership of guns that exist not as the kind of hunting-culture guns I grew up around but as fetish objects.

When you're reduced to being grateful that students and teachers at Oxford High School, in my own state, cited active-shooter trainings in guiding them to make decisions that might have saved their lives—well, I want to be grateful for a lot more than "it could have been so much worse." Because it has been worse in other places, and it will be again.

sammyo, I hear your question, and I get it. I lost a friend and her son to murder by her ex, who then killed himself, a few years ago. It's not the same as school shootings, or attacks in public gathering places. And yet, they are connected by the underlying issue of access to guns, the valorization of gun culture, and whatever blend of individual and cultural dysfunction makes these actions available to the perpetrators.
posted by Well I never at 4:00 PM on December 28, 2021 [17 favorites]


sammyo has it. Mass shootings are terrible and terrifying, but conflating every instance that meets these criteria means my local news conflates random supermarket massacres, horrible domestic killings, gang warfare, and more. My heart races at the words “mass shooting” because I work in education and discussions about this are not abstract at all, but that… utter jolt I feel at hearing of another one should not be elicited by a news anchor (or statistician, or whoever) who wants attention.

I appreciate the larger point that can be made here about “well, actually, yes—it’s the guns that are the problem, so in THAT sense yadda yadda.” That said, I do think stats like this are not very useful. There is something particularly horrifying about random mass murder that should be identified accurately as such—just as the other “mass shootings” here each have their own specific flavor of horror that should not be a… smoothing error or unimportant variable.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:05 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


This visualization would be greatly strengthened by the inclusion of child-size infograph figures. Maybe two; one for elementary school kids, one for middle and high school. To highlight our sacrifices to Moloch.
posted by Nelson at 4:08 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


I hate the knife/gun comparison especially because "Have you seen a knife and gun? Can you not tell the difference by themselves?" Anyways, this is obviously part of a derail that was deleted so my apologies for continuing the digression.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:26 PM on December 28, 2021


No gang shootings?
posted by Ideefixe at 4:42 PM on December 28, 2021


Exactly two-fifths of the states have not had mass shootings (by the article's definition) this year

It's more like 6-7 states. If you're doing CTRL+F, you need to scroll far enough to load the full year.
posted by Ickster at 5:31 PM on December 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


In elementary school I was terrified of the fire alarm. I hated how suddenly it sounded and how we'd all have to drop what we were doing, line up, and calmly exit the building while it blared. I hated the uncertainty of maybe this is another drill, or maybe it's for real this time. Some days I'd sit in class convinced that the fire alarm was about to go off and if someone happened to drag a chair across the floor, I'd jump.

I can't imagine what kids these days must go through.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:52 PM on December 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


How to Persuade Americans to Give Up Their Guns: The way to reduce gun violence is by convincing ordinary, “responsible” handgun owners that their weapons make them, their families, and those around them less safe.

Most U.S. gun casualties are inflicted one at a time, not in a mass event.

But the mass events get our attention. Just like a jetliner crash gets more attention than the many more deaths from car wrecks.
posted by NotLost at 6:03 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's more like 6-7 states. If you're doing CTRL+F, you need to scroll far enough to load the full year.

Foiled by bad design. Thanks for the correction.
posted by bryon at 6:07 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


The way to reduce gun violence is by convincing ordinary, “responsible” handgun owners that their weapons make them, their families, and those around them less safe.

OK. I have some gun-owning family members, on various points of the spectrum ranging from "I keep this locked up downstairs in case one of the black bears gets REALLY truculent" to "I have 34 separate Freedom Boom Sticks, which I keep tucked behind the cereal boxes in the cabinet in case Janet Reno comes to try to take them from me." Let's play this out.

In my corner, I have the triple threat of Statistics, Authority, and Implacable Cold Logic. Every study ever conducted by anyone over the mental age of 11 has come to the same conclusions: keeping a gun in the house is one of the worst things you can do for the wellbeing of yourself and your family, and taken in aggregate, widespread gun ownership irrefutably causes mass shooting events like the ones described in this article. Anyone with a middle-school science education can survey the field of experts and quickly realize that there's no other possible conclusion to draw.

In the opposite corner, we have a group of people who watch Tucker Carlson make that stupid face every single goddamn day of their lives. They live in a cross-section of reality that is almost completely unrecognizable from our own, where social mores are based on idealized visions of the 1950s and premillenial dispensationalism. In this world, they are the sole arbiters of truth and justice, and they're mounting a desperate last stand against the creeping liberal hegemony that wants to take away their only defense against becoming the victims of violent crimes at the hands of crack-addicted welfare-defrauding minorities. In short, they're pants-on-head crazy, having been sucked into the swirling vortex of the far-right propaganda machine and spit out on the other side no longer capable of understanding reasonable arguments against their own opinions. The chances of them reflecting on the quality of their evidence, or of lending credence to the lockstep scientific consensus on the matter, are the same as the chances of the QAnon crowd spontaneously discovering that they've been playing themselves for fools.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
posted by Mayor West at 6:55 PM on December 28, 2021 [23 favorites]


How do we talk about this topic?
I can barely even think about how this goes on and on and on and on, much less talk about it.
posted by dg at 8:28 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

The article I linked to says Americans can be roughly divided into thirds. Those on the far ends of the spectrum are not going to change their minds. But the middle third is a different story.

It's a good article. It makes a good point analogy with drunk driving -- the culture changed more than the laws changed.
posted by NotLost at 10:16 PM on December 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


We have a ten year old daughter. One of the only good things about the shutdown was not having to worry about school shootings. Now that we're "back to normal" there's always the quiet lurking dread that someday it will be our kid, at our neighborhood school. It's insane that this is something we accept as a society.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:38 PM on December 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Sandy Hook was when I finally understood that the US was never going to do anything about school shootings

Whenever Sandy Hook comes up I think of this powerful and difficult article about Dr. Amy Goldberg, the chief trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia.
“As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” Her voice rose. She said people have to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. “The country won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”

She dropped back into a softer register. “Nobody gives two shits about the black people in North Philadelphia if nobody gives two craps about the white kids in Sandy Hook. … I thought white little kids getting shot would make people care. Nope. They didn’t care. Anderson Cooper was up there. They set up shop. And then the public outrage fades.”
posted by kirkaracha at 12:04 AM on December 29, 2021 [15 favorites]


There was a shooting at my workplace a while back. I was on a later shift so I wasn’t there. One guy died, two injured. It wouldn’t’ve even made this list. Sobering.
posted by Monday at 3:01 AM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


The reality of mass shootings was forced on me when a service technician shot up a company satellite office in Hawai'i. Weapons of all kinds were then officially banned on company property after that. They were serious: An engineer opened his trunk to show a co-worker a rifle he had purchased. He didn't even take it out of the trunk. Someone saw it, reported it, and the engineer was fired on the spot.

While this is effective to a point, the problem isn't guns in the workplace (or anywhere else), it's the easy availability and the sheer number of guns in the US. I don't see how this will ever change in my lifetime.
posted by tommasz at 7:15 AM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Australia changed it in 1996 and is widely believed to have worked very well. New Zealand is making a serious effort to get guns out of its society starting in 2019 although there's some question how well it's worked.

We don't try to get guns out of the United States because we like our high rates of gun violence, mass shootings, child murders, and suicides. These are our sacrifices to Moloch.
posted by Nelson at 7:31 AM on December 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


`The Weak Better Buckle Up’: Denver Gunman Left Online Trail of Hate — A Daily Beast analysis of social media posts seems to paint McLeod as an author dedicated to alt-right philosophies—including violence., Corbin Bolies, William Bredderman, Dec. 28, 2021 10:14PM ET:
Lyndon McLeod, who police say killed five people during a deadly rampage in the Denver area, was an author dedicated to alt-right philosophies, including masculine supremacy, contrarian COVID-19 beliefs, and targeted violence against the “weak.”

McLeod appears to have operated a plethora of Twitter and Instagram accounts under the alias Roman McClay, which he used for his three-book series Sanction. The book series, with its first book described in an Amazon review as “eloquent reflections on dominance hierarchies, psychology, technology, nature, violence, anatomy and physiology, sexual morality, drug use, politics, and a whole mess of stuff,” follows a character named Lyndon McLeod, a persona named after its author who “commits 46 murders” in the book and one he seemed to allow to seep into his real life. The Daily Beast found that at least two Twitter users identified McLeod and McClay as one and the same months and even years before the shooting….
More at KUSA 9News, Denver, CO: Police ID suspect in shooting spree that killed 5, say he was 'on the radar' of law enforcement., 12/28/2021.
posted by cenoxo at 8:09 AM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]




Sandy Hook was when I finally understood that the US was never going to do anything about school shootings, the role that gun availability plays in them, or the many other deaths, by accident or by murder-suicide...

Yeah, and that's a hard thing to wrap your brain around - like a friend who insists on (name the wildly dangerous behaviour of your choice (pouring milk before tea, driving drunk, climbing Everest in swim-fins at night)) - at some point you curb your emotional involvement because you know they are likely to die in a horrible, stupid, preventable accident. That they are going to bring this misery onto the people around them - its just not tolerable.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:51 PM on December 29, 2021


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