More Deaths By Mass Shooting... Will The Carnage Continue?

From The Atlantic, yet American "leadership" is most likely to continue to say prayers and offer condolences to the families who lose loved ones, as well as partaking of solemn candlelight vigils. American leadership is apparently owned by the NRA, firearm manufactures, and gun nuts who believe the right to own private arsenals trumps the right to life.

Twenty-six people shot dead in Sutherland Springs, November 5.

Fifty-nine people shot dead in Las Vegas, October 1.

Forty-nine people shot dead in Orlando, June 12 of last year.

They are three of the five worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history. All happened in the last two years. Two occurred within the same two months.

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Diseases spread between individuals, but the contagion of mass shootings seems to spread through broadcast media. In an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, Sherry Towers, the ASU paper’s lead author, hypothesized that television, radio, and other media exposure might be the vectors through which one mass shooting infects the next perpetrator. Like a commercial, each event’s extraordinary coverage offers accidental advertising for depravity. One reason why mass-media coverage of shootings might inspire more shootings is that public glorification inspires some mass murderers. Eric Harris, the central planner of the Columbine murders, wrote Ich bin Gott—German for “I am God”—in a school notebook.

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Mass shootings are often committed by lonely and unrooted men, suffering from both grandiose aspirations and petty grievances. The postmortem descriptors are practically rote: He was cold, weird, withdrawn, a loner (and, one must note, always “he”). It’s astonishingly rare to read the antonyms: He is almost never warm, welcoming, the most popular kid in school. Even when they are not, strictly speaking, terrorism, mass shootings still seem to adhere to a sort of dark and nearly invisible ideology of oppressive self-aggrandizement, a bid for greatness that requires the destruction of others. Just because there is no formal institution like ISIS to symbolize this strain of white rage doesn’t mean that the rage isn’t ideological. It’s possible that many instances of white-male mass-shooting violence are, in fact, driven by a media-inspired religion of grievance and greatness, a mass-distributed sickness for which male outcasts are most vulnerable to infection.

“This isn’t a guns situation,” President Donald Trump claimed on Sunday in a brief address from Tokyo. But the statistics offer no doubt. There are more gun deaths in America because, simply, there are more guns. The American rates of firearm homicide, child-firearm mortality, and gun-related suicide are far higher than in any other industrialized country. The United States, home to 5 percent of the industrialized world’s population under 15 years old, accounts for 87 percent of its unintentional firearm fatalities involving that age group, according to a 2003 paper. Mass killings are an epidemic that so many leaders refuse to name, or even to see. If America cannot amend the laws that facilitate such violence, it should at least commit more resources to studying why this seems to be a paradoxical age of historically low crime, yet contagious mass murder.

Trump, echoing the NRA says it's not a gun situation. Following his vacating President Obama's restrictions on the mentally ill owning and possessing firearms he claims the problem is one of... mental illness. Odd indeed. Perhaps the BLOTUS is one suffering from a grave mental deficiency.