Tag: mass shootings

Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades

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Until two lethal rampages this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.

The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color. Continue reading.

GOP faces new pressure to act on guns

The Hill logoFor Republicans hoping to run out the clock on gun reform, the weekend’s mass shooting in Texas has complicated the math.

The killings of seven people in Odessa by a lone gunman on Saturday has rekindled the push for stricter gun laws, rousing Democrats and outside reform advocates already energized by the summer’s tragedies.

Walmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced Tuesday that it would limit its ammunition sales and request customers not openly carry firearms — a move immediately condemned by the National Rifle Association (NRA) as “shameful.”

View the complete September 3 article by Jordain Carney and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Trump again appears to back away from gun background checks

Washington Post logoPresident Trump appears to be backing away from potential support for gun background check legislation, according to White House aides, congressional leaders and gun advocates, dimming prospects that Washington will approve significant new gun measures in the wake of mass shootings that left 31 dead.

Immediately after the carnage in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Trump said “there is a great appetite” for tightening background checks on people who buy firearms. But in recent days, Trump has focused in public remarks on the need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill while emphasizing that the nation already has “very strong background checks right now” — positions that hew more closely to the views of the National Rifle Association.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s communication with key lawmakers, including Sen. Joe Manchin III, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has sought to develop bipartisan gun-control measures, has gone mostly cold, according to Capitol Hill aides, in part because Congress has left town for its summer recess.

View the complete August 20 article by Josh Dawsey and David Nakamura on The Washington Post website here.

Trump drops support for enhanced background checks two weeks after mass shootings

That didn’t take long.

It has only been two weeks since President Donald Trump formally addressed the nation in the wake of deadly shootings in El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Gilroy, California. But on Sunday, not long after he initially showed support for enhanced background checks, the president suddenly reversed course, suggesting any momentum for passing any meaningful legislation to curb gun violence may have already dissipated.

Speaking to the press before returning to Washington from vacation at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump suggested Congress had been considering various proposals in the aftermath of those shootings, but said he is primarily concerned about “mental health” issues, and insisted that the country needs to bring back “mental institutions.”

“I’m not talking about as a form of prison,” he said, “I’m saying for help.”

View the complete August 19 article by Zack Ford on the ThinkProgress website here.

As mass shootings rise, experts say high-capacity magazines should be the focus

Washington Post logoIt took a shooter all of 32 seconds to spray 41 rounds outside a popular bar in Dayton, Ohio, this month, an attack that killed nine people and injured 27. A lightning-fast response from nearby officers prevented a far higher toll: When police shot him dead, the killer still had dozens of bullets to go in his double-drum, 100-round magazine.

The use of such high-capacity magazines was banned in Ohio up until 2015, when a little-noticed change in state law legalized the devices, part of an overall rollback in gun-control measures that has been mirrored in states nationwide.

With the pace of mass shootings accelerating — and their tolls dramatically increasing — criminologists and reform advocates are more intently focused on limiting access to such accessories as one of the most potent ways to curb the epidemic.

View the complete August 18 article by Griff Witte on The Washington Post website here.

Former neo-Nazi warns mass shootings are part of an uprising: ‘This is going to get worse’

AlterNet logoFormer neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini, who created The Free Radicals Project, explained on CNN Sunday that these mass shootings from white supremacists are just the beginning.

He explained that the white supremacist manifesto the El Paso shooter left is something that he’s heard before.

“I think that manifestos have been very similar since 2009 when James von Brunn walked into the D.C. Holocaust Museum and left a manifesto,” Picciolini recalled. “They all reference the same conspiracy theories. Lately, they’ve been referencing something called ‘The Great Replacement‘ which this theory that whites being outbred in America and will be replaced. Now, it’s all based on conspiracy theories, but what’s similar about these things is now that they’re trying to outdo each other, I think the death toll is going to get bigger and bigger.”

View the complete August 5 article by Sarah K. Burris from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

This list of lives lost in mass shootings grows longer. Here are their names.

Mourners at a vigil Thursday in Westlake Village, Calif., not far from where the Borderline Bar & Grill shooting happened. Credit: Barbara Davidson, Getty Images

THREE YEARS ago, after nine people were gunned down at a community college in Roseburg, Ore., we published a list of some of the other victims of mass shootings in the United States. “Our hope,’’ we wrote, “is that we never become numb to these terrible, preventable events, but instead honor these victims by acting to prevent future shootings.”

Sadly — maddeningly — Congress has failed to do that. And the list has only gotten longer. Since its last appearance, in February, after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, there have been mass shootings at a newspaper office in Maryland, a Texas high school, a Waffle House in Tennessee, a drugstore distribution center in Maryland, a synagogue in Pittsburgh and, most recently, a bar in Southern California.

The Nov. 7 shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks was the 307th mass shooting in the United States this year, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive showing that, in all, 328 people died. Killed at the Borderline Bar were Sean Adler, 48; Cody Coffman, 22; Blake Dingman, 21; Jake Dunham, 21; Ron Helus, 54; Alaina Housley, 18; Dan Manrique, 33; Justin Meek, 23; Kristina Morisette, 20; Mark Meza Jr., 20; Telemachus Orfanos, 27; and Noel Sparks, 21.

View the complete November 16 editorial by The Washington Post on their website here.