A Sickening Case of Deja Vu

Trey Smith

One of my initial thoughts when waking up last Friday to the grim news from a Colorado movie theater was, "This has happened again?" The mass slaughter was shocking, yet so familiar. At Mother Jones we soon began to consider another question: How often has this actually happened? After four days of research and reporting, we had an answer: at least 56 times in the last 30 years, with scores of high-powered handguns and assault rifles—most of them obtained legally by the killers.

We say "at least" 56 times because, as we learned from talking with criminology experts and FBI officials, there is no official definition for "mass murderer," and robust data on the subject is hard to come by. A key requirement we included in the criteria for our research and analysis (explained here) is that the killer must have taken the lives of at least four people during the attack. Since the 1980s, that's been a generally accepted baseline for studying mass murder, according to Dr. James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, who has written multiple books on the subject. But as Fox agreed when we spoke this week, while that number seems to make some sense intuitively, there is nonetheless something coldly arbitrary about it. And if we had chosen a lower number of fatalities as a baseline, we'd be talking about many, many more cases than 56 over the last three decades.
~ from "I Was a Survivor": Recalling a Mass Shooting Four Years Ago Today by Mark Follman ~

Think about that number: 56. Utilizing their arbitrary criteria of at least 4 fatalities per incident, that comes to a minimum of 224 deaths. Add in the fact that "of the 132 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally" and we're left with a really grim picture.

I should note here that these statistics solely concern mass murders and spree killings in the US. So, what we're talking about is nearly an average of 2 per year. Of course, this doesn't factor in mass murders and spree killings of 3 fatalities or less, the scores of people wounded and scarred in these attacks, and all the other killings that go on daily across the country.

As I have stated in previous posts, I believe that easy access to firearms is the big culprit. Few of these crimes would be carried out routinely if the only weapons available were knives, arrows or rocks (shot from a slingshot). As my wife likes to say, when is the last time you heard of a drive by knifing?

I know that many people will say that people bent on killing will use whatever means are available. Whether that is a true assertion or not, I don't know, but it doesn't sound very logical to me. The attractiveness of using a gun to kill is that a shooter can do his damage and not put himself in harm's way. It's far easier to kill someone in an impersonal manner when you don't have to be right next to them. You can be several feet or yards away and, unless someone happens to be shooting at you, you aren't in much danger at all of being thwarted or stopped.

Try to kill someone with a knife and there's a much better chance the person being attacked can inflict injury (or worse) on you. While you can use something like a crossbow to kill from a safe range, you stand a better chance of being tackled while you reload. The same goes if your weapon on choice is a slingshot.

Until we do something substantive about this nation's gun problem, the number of dead, wounded and scarred from mass murders and spree killings will continue to add up year after year!!