Grim Gun Violence Milestone
This weekend, our nation reached (and then surpassed) another grim milestone with the 300th mass shooting in 2021.
A little less than two weeks ago, the mass shooting in my hometown, Austin, Texas, brought the number of such tragedies in our country in 2021 to 260.
In a piece at the time lamenting and railing against the senseless loss of lives, I wrote about the predictability, the repetitiveness, the “Groundhog Day” macabre nature of those tragedies and posed that a “standard ‘fill-in-the-blanks” news release, buried somewhere deep inside the bowels of the news medium…” could be used for future mass shootings.
I was quick to point out, however, that the suggestion of such a format was not intended to be humorous, nor satirical. Our mass shootings problem is too serious to be caricatured…
With this latest mass shooting and for a fleeting moment, the thought occurred to use that format, as I wrote in a CODA, to illustrate “the insanity of how our leaders witness the same national tragedy repeated over and over again, how they offer the same thoughts and prayers over and over again and yet expect – as the famous saying goes – ‘a different result.’”
With even a thousand caveats, such a portrayal would still trivialize the gravity and pain of these tragedies.
So, I will just, in all sincerity, say that my thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families and once again quote California Governor Gavin Newsom’s words after the May 26 mass shooting in San Jose, Ca., that took the lives of nine men:
There’s a numbness some of us are feeling about this. There’s a sameness to this…It begs the damn question of what the hell is going on in the United States of America?
And so the carnage continues…
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