It has been only 18 months since 20 elementary school children and six adults were executed by a gunman in in their Newtown, Connecticut, classrooms. In that 18-month span, there has been roughly one shooting in an American school
every school week.
Including [today's] incident at a high school in Troutdale, Oregon, 74 school shootings have taken place in the approximately 18 months since the Dec. 14, 2012, Newtown shooting. The average school year typically lasts about 180 days, which means there have been roughly 270 school days, or 54 weeks, of class since the shooting at Newtown. With 74 total incidents over that period, the nation is averaging well over a shooting a week at a school.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, more gun laws have been loosened than have been tightened. This is almost entirely due to the notion that possible public "overreach" in protecting our schools from weekly shooters will infringe upon what a certain collection of people call "gun rights," meaning the rights held by guns and their chosen owners. In the 18 months intervening, we have had a great many politicians assert that one school shooting per week of school is a considerably better outcome than taking any action to prevent those shootings. We have had persons in armed standoff with federal authorities over basic and uncontroversial laws idolized by prominent media figures as patriots or heroes for doing so. We have seen the resurgence of political figures staging contests to give away firearms to their supporters, sometimes the same make of firearms that were used in the prominent murders of a few months before. We have seen a renewed movement to normalize the carrying of larger and more weapons in more places, under the banner of freedom.
It's been only 18 months since Newtown, and one of the most horrific mass murders that could have been imagined has resulted in a wide swath of America shuddering, weeping and demanding further protection for their most cherished family members—their guns. All across America, the nation's gun lobbyists, their politicians and all those huddled around the national altar of the firearm vow that they will not allow any of America's meddling children to distract us from what is truly important.
Fuck you, Wayne. Fuck you, and then some.
