Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, Deanna Pan (MotherJones.com); Wisdom Quarterly
A Guide to Mass Shootings in America
There have been at least 62 in the last 30 years -- and most of the killers got their guns legally.
Update, Dec. 14, 2012: On Friday morning, 27 people were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Among the fatalities are 20 children, six adults, and the shooter. Mother Jones is following the story closely with regular updates here.
It's perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado on July 20, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on August 5, and another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis on September 27 are the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades.
Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. MJ mapped them below, including details on the shooters' identities, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed. More
Commentary
Wisdom Quarterly (EDITORIAL)
Since these are not likely "crazed lone gunman" incidents as the corporate media has reported for decades, we ask what is really going on. Manchurian Candidates are not so easy to produce and release into society. Just ask Judyth Vary Baker.
So they must serve some useful purposes. They spread fear and obedience/acceptance of police state tactics. We accept the encroachment of Orwellian surveillance and just about anything in the name of "security."
Such horrific events are also exploited as pretexts for curtailing rights, liberties, and dissenting viewpoints. The founders realized that an armed citizenry was harder to conquer than a disarmed one. But now it isn't the British to worry about so much as their representatives in our own government.
How easy it will now be to ban ordinary citizens from owning or possessing guns, but federal agents and "police" of all kinds keep arming themselves to the teeth. We assume it is for our protection, but FEMA camps are not for outsiders. We are the intended targets, "we the people," as every Occupy activist soon realized.
Anyone trying to free the country is in the way of those who would subvert our liberties and institute draconian measures to assure compliance. Not only will our policemen uncles but also our soldier brothers and sisters will surely turn their guns on us; it's in their training!
- (They are almost all white males committing these mass murders, so the old shorthand "Beware of strangers" doesn't work to keep us falsely feeling safe anymore. But we can't call it racial if we're the race being named. Xenophobia says it's other, always "other.")
- Look how everyone now accepts "school lockdowns," a prison term used to break and abuse inmates in the name of security, without question. Accepts? They now demand it in the name of "security."
- Remember the founder who said something like, Those willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both? (It was good ol' boy Ben Franklin, whose name in Israel could be translated as "Son of Frankenstein")
It is the point of their training: Practice on foreign enemies then search and destroy the "enemy within" whoever that may be. Who is it? Is it you? Is it me? We can't trust anyone! Run, hide, turn in your neighbor! Crawl and beg for your life. How could the population not stand up to this transparent set up.
Of course, we never believe anything bad about our government. We, however, have no trouble seeing the bad in other governments. So one can look in the mirror by seeing the same thing happening in China. On the same day as the Newtown shooting, a crazed man in China walked into a school (again) to slaughter children.
"Let's blame guns"? If guns were to blame, and they almost are, we should ban guns, ALL guns. But guns aren't going anywhere. There are 300,000,000 (three hundred million) in this country, a gun for everyone but the infants. And these crimes send sales soaring. What about when they are confiscated by those with the guns, the "security" forces? Then will we be safe from their enforcement schemes
- Watch: The Year of Mass Shootings
- Mass Shootings: Maybe What We Need Is a Better Mental-Health Policy
- More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?
- What Exactly Is a Mass Shooting, Anyway?
- "I Was a Survivor": Recalling a Mass Shooting Four Years Ago Today
- What Happened in the Newtown School Shooting
- Guns and Mass Shootings
