Massacre fatigue

[struggle4progress]

Harold I. Schwartz

... We are suffering, as a people, from massacre fatigue. Was it my imagination as news broke of still another disastrous mass murder in Thousand Oaks, Calif., only 11 days after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, that this horrendous event occupied less of the news cycle, that it disappeared from the front pages a bit sooner? Tree of Life was shocking. But do you remember First Baptist of Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 dead)? Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in Charleston, S.C.? How about the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis.? These are just the churches (and there are scores more). How about Las Vegas, Orlando, Virginia Tech, Luby’s Cafeteria, San Ysidro, Parkland, San Bernardino, the Edmond, Okla., post office, Columbine, Seattle, Wilkes-Barre, Camden, Aurora, Atlanta, Santa Fe, Sandy Hook? ...

Each incident sounds a new alarm. We rush to identify the killer so we can learn the motive. Sometimes the motive is hatred, but why one hater kills while the next doesn’t is never answered, and more often the motive remains ambiguous. Our thoughts and prayers fall flat. We send them anyway. We call for rational gun regulation. We endure the usual pushback. Blame is deflected to the mentally ill. The mentally ill are defended. We read of the lives of the victims until we can’t bear reading anymore and turn the page. This has become a ritual dance. We have become fatigued by these alarms; accustomed and even inured to the calamitous war around us.

How could this be happening to us? How is it that we can be so seemingly helpless and worn down in the face of it? Why are these horrendous outbursts of violence accelerating to nearly weekly events? There are no ready answers, but there are important concepts that can help us to explain what’s going on ...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-massacre-fatigue-shootings-numb-alarm-1121-20181119-story.html

[struggle4progress]

1. 2 Dead, Police Officer Critical In Shooting At Chicago Hospital

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/2-dead-police-officer-critical-in-shooting-at-chicagos-mercy-hospital-1950125

[angrychair]

5. Police officer has now passed

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7chicago.com/amp/mercy-hospital-chicago-shooting-4-dead-including-officer-gunman/4720765/

[struggle4progress]

2. Denver Shooting: 1 Person Dead & At Least 3 People Injured

https://hollywoodlife.com/2018/11/19/denver-mass-shooting-1-dead-gun-tragedy-same-day-chicago-hospital/

[sandensea]

3. That's just where the NRA wants us

Desensitizing us to the horrors of gun violence was always central to their long-term goals. And they got it.

[Blue_true]

9. Actually, the violence works in their favor.

They want everyone running around carrying a gun, like in old west days. That spikes the profits of the NRA's masters, gunmakers.

[struggle4progress]

4. Debate after mass shootings obscures murky reality

By ROB WATERS
KAISER HEALTH NEWS
Nov 19, 2018, 3:51 PM ET

... The “stigma-busting advocates,” who insist that mental illness has no connection to violence, and the “fearmongers,” who assert that “the mentally ill are a dangerous menace and should be locked up,” are both wrong, said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University who has studied patterns of violence in major U.S. cities.

While it is true that mental illness plays only a small role in most forms of violence, including individual homicides, its role is larger in mass shootings ...

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, the psychiatrist who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center 20 years ago, long has argued that society needs to be more forceful in getting care for the severely disturbed — and requiring it when necessary — to prevent suicide, mass shootings and other violence.

His goal is to get more state legislatures to pass bills like Kendra’s Law in New York and Laura’s Law in California that allow judges to order mentally ill people into outpatient treatment. His organization helped draft both those bills and has helped win passage of similar laws in at least 16 states. In California and some other states, however, the reach of the law is limited by whether counties decide to implement the approach ...

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/gun-control-mental-health-care-debate-mass-shootings/story?id=59294750

[spanone]

6. You can throw in the bombs that went to Democrats into that same time period...

[struggle4progress]

7. How many more victims will it take?

By MIKE JOHNSTON | Guest Commentary
PUBLISHED: November 19, 2018 at 1:09 pm
UPDATED: November 19, 2018 at 2:14 pm

... Susan Orfanos, who watched her son survive one mass shooting only to be killed in another, offers a chilling rebuke of American inaction. She screamed into the camera of ABC7 in Southern California: “I don’t want prayers, I want gun control.” It was the kind of exhortation America saw from Emmett Till’s mother during the civil rights movement, or from Matthew Shepard’s mother after his beating death in Wyoming: a demand for our country to care for what they had lost as if these young men were our own.

For the last 250 years, albeit imperfectly, American democracy has found its way through these crises by relying on representative government to work. When Americans experience systemic injustice or suffering, they communicate that pain to their elected officials, and those elected officials — out of empathy, self-interest or a genuine sense that change is needed — implement reforms to alleviate that suffering, even if it does not effect them directly.

A Colorado legislature full of men voted to give women the right to vote; white members of congress voted to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; straight men and women voted for marriage equality. They were pressured by activists and advocates; they witnessed the suffering of their fellow Americans and they chose to act.

That was what we believed would happen after the Aurora shooting, and then Sandy Hook and Charleston, then Orlando, then Las Vegas, then Parkland and now Thousand Oaks, and yet, we have witnessed them all without a single piece of substantive gun safety legislation making its way through the U.S. Congress ...

https://www.denverpost.com/2018/11/19/gun-control-gun-violence-victims-mass-shootings/

[struggle4progress]

8. It's Going to Take More Than Background Checks and AR-15 Bans

By JOHN DONOHUE
November 16, 2018

... Although the vast majority of mass shooters have left a record that would clearly reflect unsuitability for gun possession, this information is often in the hands of relatives and neighbors and even police and prosecutors who have not pursued gun-barring convictions, but not in the relevant databases. Two steps are needed. Increased efforts to ensure that those who act violently and abuse firearms are quickly prosecuted and stripped of their weapons, and those with information relevant to triggering red-flag laws should act with urgency to effectuate those protections. Without these efforts, most mass shooters (including those from the Thousand Oaks bar and the Pittsburgh synagogue) will just appear to be “law-abiding citizens” free to buy and possess their guns legally — until they kill.

Background checks also fail to address the problem of those who descend into a potentially violent tailspin — whether from addiction, PTSD or some other life stressor — sometime after they acquire their weapons. In the rest of the developed world, gun owners must renew their licenses, which protects the public from dangerous individuals by removing their weapons. Any serious investigation into the background of the California shooter — or the Pennsylvania shooter or the man who, in between those massacres, killed two and injured five at a Florida yoga studio — would have uncovered, albeit not a criminal record, but clear patterns of behavior showing they were unworthy of firearm possession ...

At the same time, we need to address the growing problem of how easily firearms are stolen from homes and — in the growing world of gun-carrying — from cars. Approximately four hundred thousand guns are stolen every year in the United States, keeping criminals stocked with the latest weaponry. At Sandy Hook Elementary School, we saw the deadly consequences when law-abiding citizens do not adequately secure their firearms ...

Nearly every mass shooting illustrates how large-capacity magazines can increase the death toll. Forcing a shooter to reload more frequently can provide both opportunities for counter-attack, as we saw in the Florida yoga studio, and for escape, as occurred during breaks in shooting in Thousand Oaks. Although California’s laws have limited its rate of mass shootings to half that of a more gun-friendly state like Florida, a more dedicated effort is still needed if we are to adequately address this growing menace.

http://time.com/5456015/gun-control-background-checks-ar15-mass-shootings/