Past Summary Ledgers | Gun Violence Archive

The death of the innocent is always important and we should all try to stop this, the problem lies with those that use those deaths as a stage for their inner demons. They actually seem to look forward to the next killing so they can say "Look I told you so". While the death of our young is important all innocent life lost do to the monsters that walk among us are important. It has become so common place that only the deaths that can be used for political fodder seem to get reported. Can we stop this? I doubt it due to the generations that have been raised to be best buds with their mothers and fathers, the lack of actually parenting and the lack of family structure in so many homes. Responsibility has become less of lesson in life when you can blame others for all your bad luck. Politicians on both sides of the isle are as much at fault as the sperm donors and two legged incubators that are producing these monsters. Unless we really address the real problem we will continue to lose our loved ones and have meaningless battles on Social Media while the bodies stack up.

I think there are a few factors involved. First, there is the sudden large number killed or wounded at once. It's the same reason a plane crash killing many people in a single incident gets more national attention than a local shooting. And a mass shooting, like a plane crash, is more "spectacular" in an "out of the ordinary" type meaning than a single guy getting shot.

Then, I think there is more of an "it could happen to me (or my kids) feeling about school shootings than daily crime related shootings. Most people believe (and are mostly right) that if they avoid high crime areas, that they unlikely to become a victim of a gang shooting. But school/mass shootings usually happen in so called nice parts of town, which increases the fear factor and unpredictability of them. So I think that also contributes to the increased visibility. It's due to the feeling that they could happen anywhere.

As for your example of mitigation, the sad fact is that the Centers for Disease control has been expressly prohibited by laws and regulations passed by the republican congresses from spending any money researching gun violence as the public health issue that it is. The big money of the gun lobby has effectively shut down any research into gathering hard facts and examining possible mitigating factors. So we have been stymied from properly examining the issue. There are actually many people and organizations that are very concerned with the gun violence in Chicago and other places. But until our government is willing to apply resources to really study the issue, little progress will be made. And as long as so many politicians ( and that includes some democrats as well) are so dependent on and afraid of the gun lobby, nothing will get done other than another shipment of thoughts and prayers being delivered.

We are the only industrialized nation in the world with this level of gun violence, but we are told that there is nothing that can be done.

I agree with you about individual killings and how they get little or no press time and in many cities are mentioned merely as a sideline to the rest of the news. Like one would hear if there was a chance for snow later in the week. Sad to say that our children are becoming so desensitized to killing because they see it in their video games 24/7 and have become so used to it that they don't think of a particular shooting as anything more than points in a game.

We on the other hand should know better and still we aren't as shocked as we should be when we hear that Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan. Based on the number of deaths in one year a soldier from Chicago claimed he felt safer in country than he did when home in Illinois. How incredibly sad to hear his statement.

Maybe the deaths are explained away as being some gang related retribution but those human beings are someones children too and somewhere along the way they lost their own personal respect for life and chose to live fast and die young.