The repetition of horror numbs the mind: just 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a racist-driven man killing 10 people in a supermarket. The next day, another angry man entered a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, California, killing one person and injuring five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas, a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the murder of at least 19 second-, third-, and fourth-graders.
“I guess it’s something in society that we know will happen again and again,” said Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis died at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. .
Misery is rising, but nothing is changing, leaving Americans with little to do but keep lists, mental death spreadsheets that treat events like Uvalde as another morbid record with superlatives like the “second deadliest shooting in a elementary School”.
Each event evokes an atrocity from the past, the exact details of each shooting each year become more indistinguishable: the last death toll at 21 at Texas Robb Elementary School surpasses the shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, when there were 17 people. dead. It does not reach the deadliest school shooting, when 26 people were killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
These are the mathematics of American gun massacres.
The three school shootings (Newtown, Parkland and now Uvalde) overshadowed Columbine in 1999, when these events still had the power to shock the nation.
The reasons for the violence are well known and incontrovertible. The United States has many more guns than citizens, about 400 million firearms, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan small arms survey, and 331 million people.
For more than a decade, semi-automatic pistols, purchased for personal protection, sell more than rifles, which have been commonly used in hunting.
And the coronavirus pandemic caused even more madness to buy weapons. Annual national arms production rose from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020, according to a report released this month by the Office of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The vast majority of these firearms remained in the United States.
The toll of violence, especially on children, has only increased. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and under increased by about 50 percent from late 2019 to late 2020.
Last year, more than 1,500 children and adolescents under the age of 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings, compared to about 1,380 in 2020, according to the Pistol Violence Archive, a database that tracks deaths by weapons.
Many details about the shooting in Uvalde have not been made public, including the weapons used by the gunman – an 18-year-old man who died at the scene, authorities said – and how he obtained them. But the emotional turmoil of the murders was sadly familiar.
“Why are we willing to live with this butchery?” President Biden said Tuesday night after returning from a trip to Asia. “Why are we still letting this happen?”
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a young lawmaker when children were killed in Sandy Hook, urged fellow senators to act Tuesday. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” he told the Senate.
These were questions with typical answers: not much at the federal level. Republicans, often appealing to the Second Amendment, have blocked efforts to add tighter background checks for gun buyers whenever another major mass shooting worsens the nation’s consciousness. However, just hours after the shooting in Uvalde, New York Democrat Sen. .
Meanwhile, states like Texas have advanced with some of the least restrictive gun laws in the United States, boasting more than a million states with responsible gun owners, even with their recent shooting history. massive.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed a comprehensive law in 2021 that ended the requirement for Texans to obtain a handgun license, allowing virtually anyone over the age of 21 to carry one. Historic law made the state one of the largest to adopt a “constitutional carrying” law that basically removes most restrictions on the ability to carry handguns.
Mr. Abbott described it as “the strongest Second Amendment legislation in Texas history.”
Mass shootings have become so common in the United States that only a small fraction increase to attract widespread attention beyond the directly affected communities. The same weekend as the Buffalo killings, more than a dozen people were shot dead in central Milwaukee, near the arena where an NBA playoff game ended hours earlier, the authorities.
Two weeks earlier, the owner and two employees of the Broadway Inn Express motel in Biloxi, Mississippi, were shot dead, and another person was also shot dead during a car theft.
Less than four weeks earlier, a bomb blast in Sacramento had killed six people and injured 12 in a shootout that reportedly involved at least five gunmen.
On Monday, the FBI released data showing a pattern of rapid escalation of public shootings in the United States.
The office identified 61 attacks by “active shooters” in 2021 that killed 103 people and injured 130 more. This was the highest annual total since 2017, when 143 people died and hundreds more were injured, figures inflated by the sniper attack on the Las Vegas Strip.
The 2021 total represented a 52 percent increase over the count of these shots in 2020 and a 97 percent increase since 2017, according to the FBI’s Active Shooter Incidents report in the United States in 2021.
In Uvalde, Rey Chapa has a nephew who was at school during the shooting but was not injured.
“That’s just a bad thing,” Mr. Chapa in an interview, using an insult. I was waiting to hear from family and friends about other children’s conditions and scrolling through Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’ll meet a lot of these kids who were murdered.”
Contributing reports were Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson, Christine Hauser, Eduardo Medina, Sarah Mervosh, Alexandra E. Petri, Michael D. Shear, Glenn Thrush, and Elizabeth Williamson.