Lock ’em, and load ’em! Or whatever.

Now nearly a month since the South Carolina church massacre, and seemingly a dry-spell of mass-gun-killings — yet not. Weird shit this mass killing narrative, and today the beat goes on: Four Marines were killed at two military offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with the gunman being shot dead.
In a USAToday survey this afternoon: ‘The data show that mass killings occur roughly every two weeks, a figure that has remained steady for the past decade.’

(Illustration found here).

Time runs amok, then. Yesterday, however (via KTLA): ‘Four people were found shot dead Wednesday in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, and authorities say they are looking for the person responsible. A boy, about 8 years old, was injured, Sheriff Leroy Ravenell told reporters. The child’s condition was not immediately clear.’

Pretty-clear, though, is a gun-killing problem.
Meanwhile, along with a mass killing, two other mass-killing related items — ‘Dylann Roof, who was charged with murdering nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, S.C. in June, will go on trial in July of 2016.’
And: ‘James Holmes was found guilty of first-degree murder Thursday in the deaths of 12 people at a Colorado theater three years ago — and now faces the possibility of being sentenced to death.’

Speaking of the latter, and more from that USAToday survey:

In the three years since James Holmes shot dozens of moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., 78 additional mass killings have occurred, claiming the lives of nearly 400 additional victims.
…
There have been 15 mass killings so far this year, claiming 74 lives.
Two have occurred in the past two days: the shootings of two adults and two teenagers in Holly Hill, S.C. Wednesday and four Marines gunned down at a military recruitment center in Chattanooga, Tenn., today.
Roughly 80 percent of the mass killings in the past three years have involved guns.

And this mass-killing shit is contagious — fuck me!
From LiveScience earlier this month:

Mass shootings spawn subsequent mass shootings, new research finds.
The researchers discovered statistical “clusters” of shootings in which four or more people die, the standard definition of a mass shooting.
School shootings also cluster, said study researcher Sherry Towers, a professor of mathematical and computational modeling at Arizona State University.
“On average, one school shooting inspires 0.22 other school shootings,” Towers told Live Science. “And on average, one mass shooting inspires 0.3 more mass shootings.”
…
The idea that violence might be contagious is not new.
Suicides often cluster, in a phenomenon known as suicide contagion, in which vulnerable people are inspired to take their own lives after reading about the details of previous suicides.
In an attempt to stop the contagion, many media outlets abide by voluntary reporting standards to not sensationalize suicides.
Likewise, many experts in mass shootings have suspected the notoriety of previous killers inspires new shooters.
Newspaper reports can give unstable people something to emulate, Tony Farrenkopf, a forensic psychologist in Portland, Oregon, who has created psychological profiles of mass shooters, told Live Science in 2012 after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“We’re the first to quantify what has long been suspected,” Towers said

America is in a violently-weird place…