I didn’t create that headline. It’s an onion piece, that was was written back in 2014, yet still remains hauntingly relevant.
The shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, is the 45th school shooting in the United States in the 274 days so far in 2015. Another project, Mass Shooting Tracker, has a broad definition of mass shootings. While the FBI measures a “mass shooting” as an incident when people are killed, the tracker classifies a mass shooting as an event when four or more people are shot. Using that criteria, the tracker reports that 294 known mass shootings have occurred this year.
“America is the only developed country where when someone asks if you heard about that campus shooting, you have to clarify, ‘Which one?’ That is unacceptable. Something has to change,” Colin Goddard, a survivor of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
“There’s been another mass shooting in America — this time, in a community college in Oregon. That means there’s another community stunned with grief, and communities across the country are forced to relive their own anguish, and parents across the country who are scared because they know it might have been their families and their children. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week, or a couple of months from now.
We don’t yet know why this individual did what he did. And it’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.
Earlier this year, I answered a question in an interview by saying, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings.” And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day! Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.
And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws.
We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it, ” Barak Obama.
