Here we go again! Another day, another shooting. The news screamed 4 killed and nine injured in a shooting at a Georgia high school.
The shooter is a 14-year-old boy armed with an “AR Platform style weapon,” which is a semiautomatic rifle and the dead were two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. The nine injured are expected to survive.
Shifting through the anger, mayhem, shock and sadness, the question arises as it always does after a shooting of this magnitude. WHY? What was a 14-year-old doing with an assault-style weapon in the first place? There are no clear-cut answers only that 4 more people have been killed and many others injured not to mention the psychological trauma that follows after each shooting. The shooter is in custody and will be charged as an adult.
According to livemint.com, “In the past two decades, the US has experienced hundreds of school and college shooting with the deadliest occuring at Virginia Tech in 2007, where over 30 people were killed. This ongoing violence has intensified the debate over gun laws and the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right “to keep and bear arms.”
High profile mass shootings are a norm in the US and gun violence has been on the rise but even though President Biden has taken more executive actions to reduce gun violence than any other president, the violence continues.
Increasing background checks before firearm purchases has not helped much.
Increasing appropriate use of extreme risk protection (“red flag”) orders and safe storage of firearms has not helped much.
Addressing the loss or theft of firearms during shipping and holding the gun industry accountable has not helped amongst other measures has not helped much either.
Here’s the shocking statistic. The Apalachee High School shooting makes it the 30th mass killing this year according to the The Associated Press and USA Today which brings the total dead to 131 people. Last year there were 217 deaths from 42 mass killings in the US making it one of the deadliest years on record.
Where do we go from here? It will be days of mourning followed by laying the victims to rest and asking the question “why” over and over again. However, getting “gun violence” under control is a whole other ballgame. It needs much much more than just lip service and you and I know exactly what is needed to get it in control, don’t we?
Enough said.
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