In light of yet another shooting yesterday at the Columbia Mall in Maryland and the intense, accelerated pace in which these horrific events operate — earlier this month, a study on “active shootings in public settings” and time:

The average median time for police to respond to these incidents (where data was available) is three minutes.
Despite the hurried police response time, the study found that almost half of the active shootings are over before officers arrive.
“This points to the phenomenal speed with which these events occur,” the researchers wrote.

Via CNN this morning on the Columbia Mall public setting: Police entered the mall within minutes of the first 911 calls and found three people dead.

Absolutely all-over much-too quickly.

(Illustration found here).

And what were the mall shooter’s intentions? If this particular guy killed two people and himself in a matter of seconds, what the shit was his original plan? Police found him packed with “a large amount of ammunition,” along with “two crude devices that appeared to be an attempt at making explosives using fireworks.”
A goodly chunk of these people, after doing considerable damage in a brief space, kill themselves pretty-quickly, too. As the kid who shot-up Arapahoe High School in suburban Denver last month: Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the suspect stopped firing on others and turned his weapon on himself 80 seconds after entering the school.
And another: The gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary committed suicide about a minute before officers reached him, but not before killing 20 first-graders and six adult staffers.

In the study cited above: Shootings most often take place at businesses (40 percent), followed by schools (29 percent), outdoors (19 percent) and other places (12 percent).
Although places like industrial Navy yards, airports, movie theaters, work-places, are the most-popular shooting locales, the killing of children gnarls/panics the gut, even for old children — yesterday, young people died at a mall, the oldest of the lot at 25, the shooter only 19. No motive as yet ascertained, as always, and brings to mind a Hemingway quote that’s appropriate:

“You expected to be sad in the fall.
Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.
But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”

And those last words, ‘a young person died for no reason,’ supposedly a focal point for something/anything incredibly tragic, and, obviously stupid. Yet we keep hammering away — permanently equalizing.
In the schools location-category, the situation is beyond ridiculous — so far in the 26 days of 2014, a shooting at a school has been reported every other school day.
Via Think Progress last Thursday:

Though the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, 2014 is off to a deadly start: in the first 14 school days of the year, there have been at least 7 school shootings.
For sake of comparison, there were 28 school shootings in all of 2013, according to gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action.

And then Friday afternoon, an Iraq-like update for the story was needed because of another school shooting, this one at South Carolina State University, where one student was killed.
Seven in just a little over three weeks don’t bode well for the way-rest of the year — if math can be beyond illuminating, near a 100 for 2014.
We sure-as-shit hope the numbers prove way-wrong.

Unfortunately, gun nuts create much-much more noise — large-lip Wayne LaPierre of NRA fame, for instance, or most of the state of Texas. There are some debunking the debunked — moral panic just after Sandy Hook Elementary has subsided into just another “new normal.” Laws won’t impede the killings, done-too-late. There’s way-way-too-many guns already.
Since Sandy Hook nothing legally-substantial from Congress anyway, and in the various state houses, mainly just bat-shit-craziness: Nearly two-thirds of the new laws ease restrictions and expand the rights of gun owners.
Hence, the rub.

And an offshoot of the over-prevailing US gun culture is an obvious clue to Americans witless attitudes — via the Washington Post on Friday:

You might think so from the number of guns and knives that people try to carry onto airplanes each year.
That number would be 1,813 guns that were snared by Transportation Security Administration at airport checkpoints last year.
Only 1,477 of them were loaded.
That’s a jump from 2012, when 1,556 guns were confiscated.
The parts of the country where toting a sidearm is more common were where a lot of the guns turned up.
The airports in Atlanta (111 guns), Dallas (96), Houston (68), Phoenix (66) and Denver (51) lead the list.

Up into a crazy blue yonder, well above public places, which exist now only in memory.