Less than a week after the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting—a day during which the FBI processed two firearm background checks per second, and on which four people were shot at a restaurant in Sacramento—news of another mass shooting is rolling in. This time it’s in San Bernardino. If it seems like this happens every day in America, you’d be wrong: it happens more often than that.
This year, the Washington Post has been updating Wonkblog regularly with thenumbers on mass shootings, as compiled by a Reddit community that counts a mass shooting as “any event in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire.” This year, there have been more shootings than days. Today, December 2, is the 336th day of the year; with this shooting, we are (at least) at 352 shootings.
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The total number of shootings has already surpassed 2014’s number and will soon surpass 2013’s, a cycle which shows no signal of stopping, as America tends to respond to gun violence by buying more guns. Via the AP:
The previous record for the most background checks in a single day was Dec. 21, 2012, about a week after 20 children and six adults were shot to death in a Connecticut elementary school. The week following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary saw the processing of 953,613 gun background checks.
There are no solutions in sight, except any number of obvious solutions that have been immediately obstructed by GOP lawmakers, like expanded background checks or bans on assault weapons that no civilian should ever desire to own. Our nation now exists in a state of constant mourning; the Republican response to these shootings has rendered the idea that “All Lives Matter”—let alone black lives—an excruciating farce.
At this point, we may be down to this.
If every Black male 18-35 applied for a conceal& carry permit, and then joined NRA in one day; there would be gun control laws in a second
— Wendell Pierce (@WendellPierce) November 23, 2015
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