At a housewarming party this weekend in Denver—down the road from Columbine, and Aurora, and Boulder—I met a guy from upstate New York, and I immediately thought of the racist massacre that killed 10 people in Buffalo earlier this month. I met a woman from Orlando, and I thought of the Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 people dead.
On October 28, 2018, I finished my shift at an ice cream shop in Brooklyn and walked to the sports bar next door to watch the Red Sox win the World Series. It was very cheerful, the way a sports bar is during the playoffs, and all the Sox fans were cheering and patting each other on the back. As I left, a group of guys in yarmulkes and Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys congratulated me with big high-fives. But as I got on my bike and pedaled home, my good mood started to fade. The day before, a gunman had entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where those men were ostensibly from, killing 11 people.
Mass shootings have become so ubiquitous in the United States that there are people who have survived multiple, and others who have survived one mass shooting only to die in another. Seemingly no place is immune; from blue states like Connecticut to red states like Texas, the massacres keep happening, as our map of mass shootings shows.
Just one week after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, it can be hard to find any reason to hope that things will change. Still, my colleagues have done a good job making the case for optimism. As national affairs editor Mark Follman points out, mass shooters typically show detectable warning signs that allow threat assessment experts to intervene before a potential perpetrator turns violent. And as senior news editor Jeremy Schulman writes, the National Rifle Association has been largely defanged, which, in theory, should allow Republicans to vote with their conscience on gun control. House Democrats are making moves to reform gun laws. Maybe, just maybe, politicians will have decided that enough is enough.
—Abigail Weinberg
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