In the last seven years more than 900 people have died in mass shootings in the United States according to a USA TODAY analysis of gun related slayings. In the analysis those deaths accounted for only 1% of all gun related homicides in America.
The extra attention that workplace, shopping mall, and especially school shootings get in the national media compared to domestic violence type murder suicides, and other mass shooting incidents are a reflection of the American audiences need for the extreme in order for mass media to get people’s attention in this technologically busy self-centered world we live in.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations calculated that in 2012 one person was murdered in America every 35.4 minutes. According to the FBI crime report firearms were used in 67.8 percent of the carnage nation-wide.
I live in Seattle Washington, and in May of 2012 Seattle got another taste of the senseless mass shooting virus that seems to infect the public regardless of where they live. Ian Stawicki opened fire at the Café Racer Espresso shop in the University District killing four at the coffee shop, and then killing a woman in a parking lot while stealing her SUV. Stawicki finally shot himself in the head after being spotted and confronted by the Seattle police.
Neither Ian Stawiki’s father nor the Seattle police department have yet to come up with a “rational” motive for his actions. Bouts of mental illness were scrutinized and an infatuation with the barista worker was also implied, but those are only guesses and vague clues as to what makes these indiscriminant killers go “Ape Shit Nuts” on people that did nothing in most cases to threaten or physically harm them.
Obviously people and society in general were perceived by these homicidal maniacs as a dangerous threat to their mentalities, egos, and/or ideologies, not to them physically.
Can society blame violent video games like the notorious Grand Theft Auto, with their murderous and tacky tasteless digital gangster gore? The aggressive fantasies of enacting human degradation to others that games like “GTA” provide to angry dark apathetic teenagers and their grown up counterparts who devoutly play these types of games are too easy an explanation for the nation’s unrelenting rash of mass shootings; I believe that the problem goes much deeper into our society’s perception of who’s to blame when life or the world refuses to go our way.
Everyone in our society ends up being the ones who pay when these blamers finally snap and attack. Their irrationality eats away at our rational ideals making us eventually numb to their unexplainable violent actions towards indiscriminant strangers, and thus apathetic about them.
America needs to look into this epidemic of indiscriminant unwarranted mass murder, dig past the easy politically correct issues like whether guns are to blame, or is it really the fault of the mentally ill.
What we as a people need to do is look deeper at our society as a whole, then we will find out whether guns, murder, and mass shootings have become the everyday norm and established way of American life; or whether this epidemic of gun violence is really a warning sign of the ever-growing American societal lack of respect for everyone else’s lives but their own.
http://voices.yahoo.com/guns-murder-mass-shootings-all-american-way-12393349.html
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