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In 2005, the FBI and leading criminologists defined a mass shooting as “an attack in a public place in which four or more victims [are] killed,” stated on “Mother Jones” website. However, President Barack Obama issued a mandate in January 2013 lowering the baseline to three or more victims in order for an event to be considered a mass shooting.
On “K12Academics’” website, they stated that the earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property “was the Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indian entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only two children survived.”
This information stuns readers since the public tends to consider mass shootings as a common-day phenomenon. In reality, they have been occurring every few years since 1853 – aside from the one that occurred in 1764.
“Mother Jones’” website contains a study called “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America” where they went into detail and explained how there have been 80 public mass shootings in the United States, “with the killings unfolding in 33 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii” since 1982.
Forty-three of these shootings have occurred since 2006 – study conducted in 2012 – with seven of them having taken place in 2012 alone.
None of this data collected included robberies or crime/gang violence; just mass shootings.
During his speech on gun control on Jan. 5, President Barack Obama stated that after Connecticut “passed a law requiring background checks and gun safety courses, gun deaths decreased by 40 percent.”
Although Connecticut seems to be moving forward after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, “Mother Jones’” analysis of
the 62 cases of shootings stated three quarters of the guns used by these shooters were obtained legally.
The analysis continued to state that more than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings and “the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings.”
Not only did the analysis cover where the shootings took place and how the weapons were obtained but the data found common traits of the shooters.
Forty-four of the shooters were white males with the average age of the group being 35.
Another study found that students account overwhelmingly for the greatest number of fatalities. Female students are actually twice as likely to be fatalities than male students.
“Radfem Groundhog Day” the website claimed gun availability not only as a main factor to the prevalence of mass shootings, but also the main reason why the United States “seems to be the world capitol in mass shootings as well as high levels of individual crime.”
The website also claimed that the high levels of gun crime is the reason why some of the U.S. shooters aim for a high body count.
“To gain the fame for the crime,” “Radfem Groundhog Day’s” website said. “Because the shooting of just a handful of people in the U.S. generally only make the local news.”
Well, mass shootings, regardless of their body count, seem to be beginning to make more headway with major news outlets.
In Obama’s speech about gun control, he began a statement by saying that he knows citizens are worried about their second amendment rights being taken from them, “Second Amendment rights are important, but there are other rights that we care about as well.”
But whether citizens are pro-gun or anti-gun, Obama continued to claim that everyone’s rights have been denied recently.
“Because our right to worship freely and safely, that right was denied to Christians in Charleston, South Carolina, denied Jews in Kansas City, and denied Muslims in Chapel Hill. Our right to peaceful assembly, that right was robbed from moviegoers in Aurora. Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college kids. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.”
One man is currently taking the internet by storm because he thinks he has found the solution to putting a stop to mass shootings.
Rob Myers’ solution? “Notice those around you who seem isolated, and engage them.”
Myers said he is tired of the public calling for “something” to be done by the government, but having no idea how they would want it done. His current argument is that citizens want things to change, but they do not want to be the ones to do anything.
The one fact that remains? Regardless of the year, president, or even laws being out into effect, mass killings at schools have been occurring for hundreds of years and seem to be picking up momentum.
The College Column 