His name is Card and he probably won’t survive
Suspect
Many of those who know he’s the suspect in the Lewiston, Maine mass shooting on October 25 in which eighteen people were killed and thirteen were injured probably don’t want him to survive. I guess the people who think that way think his death “evens things out.”
Hardly.
There have been 487 mass shootings in the U.S. this year with 571 dead and 1,947 injuries. You don’t need a complicated equation to see that the country is averaging over one shooting per day. While I’m against the ownership of military-style weapons by civilians because they greatly increase the number of casualties, I think the issue is larger than too many guns.
Are we bored with the problem yet? Perhaps because as individuals we’re apparently powerless to stop the epidemic short of bashing the NRA which, while not surprising, hasn’t solved the problem of why this is happening.
According to Everytown Research, “Mass shootings haunt our nation’s collective conscience. Each breaking news alert floods the nation with grief, fear, and anger at the countless acts of preventable violence happening in schools, churches, parks, supermarkets, and other places where people are going about their everyday lives.”
True, but hardly earthshaking.
The Pew Research Center provides a lot of statistics for analysis, but they are more WHAT than WHY. Likewise, the Violence Project. Numerous other Internet sites provide simiar stats.
An EFSGV report states thatm “More than two-thirds of mass shootings are domestic violence incidents or are perpetrated by shooters with a history of domestic violence, according to one of the first peer-reviewed research papers exploring the links between domestic violence (DV) and mass” Okay, there’s a clue, but where does it lead us?
Dr. Jillian Peterson says “Perpetrators tend to be radicalized through studying other shooters before them. Many of them spend time on the internet in kind of these dark chat rooms where violence is really celebrated and validated. And then they go into this act knowing it’s their final act. So they’re kind of actively suicidal, planning to die in the act. They have access to the firearms that they need. And many of them leak their plans. Many of them tell other people they’re thinking about violence before they do it. And then they go out and they choose a location that’s symbolic of their grievance with the world because they’re looking for this fame and notoriety in their death that they didn’t have in their life.”
Helpful to know as is the entire interview. What frustrates me, and perhaps others is that the statistics don’t lead us to an answer, and neither do the best analyses of what’s happening and how we can stop it. That is, we can’t go out an arrest everyone who can get a gun, who has a grievance, who has mental issues, who comes from a dysfuntional family, or who is simply pissed off at the world or his/her workplace.
So, we’re stuck watching it happen like a bad movie without an ending. The shootings make many of us feel powerless less and perhaps that’s the way the killers feel.
–Malcolm
