8,796 and counting

It wasn’t always this way.

Time was, mass murder wasn’t an everyday, spur-of-the-moment, entrepreneurial activity.

 It wasn’t that long ago that killing a lot of people all at one time wasn’t a job for a lone amateur. Mass killings were generally the province of well paid professionals – Hitler’s einsatzgruppen, Stalin’s NKVD, and the favored thugs of a variety of lesser despots come readily to mind. Free market mayhem on a mass scale was a rare thing, and when it did occur – consider the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre or the Haymarket Riot – such acts of carnage evoked such public shock and outrage that they still find their way into high school history books to this day.

Today, Al Capone’s Valentine’s Day body count would hardly make front page in the local news.

From the looks of it, killing people, lots of people, has simply become something Americans do. A national quirk that pretty much sets us apart from the rest of the world.

The template for our contemporary killing craze was laid out Aug. 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman killed his wife and his mother, then climbed 28 flights of stairs to the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower, where, for the next 96 minutes he used a hunting rifle and other weapons to kill 14 and wound  31 before he was gunned down by law enforcement officers.

Whitman set the bar high for any wanna-bes who dreamed to follow him into the headlines. Taking out a lot of people with a bolt action hunting rifle and a brace of revolvers was no easy feat – reloading takes time and a limited number of bullets put a necessary limit on the amount of damage a shooter could do.

Vietnam changed all that.

Weapons of war are designed with a singular purpose: to kill. Efficiently. Reliably. Rapidly. Vietnam introduced Americans to the assault rifle, an infantry weapon designed specifically to maximize damage to the human body in close combat situations.

When civilian versions of these military killing machines hit the mass market it was a game changer for aspiring celebrity killers. When equipped with magazines holding up to 30 rounds of high velocity ammunition, these weapons put almost unimagined firepower into the hands of any malcontent, misanthrope, sociopath or lone wolf terrorist with fingers to pull the trigger. With politicians and the NRA guaranteeing availability to one and all, it was open season on whoever, wherever, whenever a shooter chose to strike.

And strike they did.  From 2009 to 2017 there were more than 170 mass shootings in the United States, and in nearly two-thirds of those, 58 percent, the shooter was made more productive by using a weapon equipped with magazines holding more than 10 rounds each – a practice that effectively doubled the number of fatalities and increased the number of folks shot and wounded 14-fold.

And 2019 has been a banner year for ad hoc bloodshed. Two hundred and seventeen days into the year we’ve tallied 255 incidents of mass murder – killing sprees that left at least four people dead, not counting the death of the gunman. It’s a bit gruesome, but worthy of note,  that the recent shooter in Dayton, Ohio, managed to kill nine and wound 27 in less than a minute. Had Whitman managed that rate of carnage in 1966, his 96 minute spree would have left 864 dead and 2,592 bleeding.

Yeah, it hasn’t always been this way.

But by Monday afternoon, across the United States, 8,796 people had been shot and killed and 17,480 were recovering from gunshot wounds.

This in a country where driving with a telephone in hand is deemed an intolerable risk to public safety.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to do something about that.