Another school shooting today and with gun action again a part of American folklore, the perplexity of keeping account of the action is understandable:
It’s possible we have a gun problem in this country but I don’t want to be too rash. https://t.co/tt2iMSs4db
— Molly Jong-Fast? (@MollyJongFast) April 12, 2021
First, and unrelated this afternoon, a school shooting in Knoxville, Tenn. (ABC News):
Police faced gunfire as they responded to reports of a possible gunman at a Tennessee high school Monday, leaving one person dead and an officer wounded, authorities said.
No one else was killed or wounded at Austin-East Magnet High School in Knoxville, a city about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Nashville, police said. A male has been detained. Police said they responded to the school around 3:15 p.m. and when they encountered a male with a gun, shots were fired.
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Three students from Austin-East Magnet High School have been shot to death away from the campus less than three weeks apart this year, police said.
Administrators have said students felt the arts magnet school was a safe space, according to a story in the Knoxville News Sentinel.
And last night also in Tennessee, separate shootings in about the same time and area — about 90 minutes from Knoxville, which from all I could find was subject of the newscaster’s confusion in the tweet above:
Investigators are working to determine what led to two different shootings in the same area of Kingsport on Sunday night, with one shooting involving a law enforcement officer.
KPD Public Information Officer Tom Patton said it was a coincidence that both shooting incidents took place around the same time and location along Virgil Avenue in the Lynn Garden community.
“It would not be unusual for two crime scenes to intersect, or maybe a wreck scene and a crime scene to intersect if it was on a major thoroughfare. But this kind of happened on a side street off of Lynn Garden. So it was very unusual for it to happen at that location,” said Patton.
And gun-crazy weird Saturday night in North Carolina (also ABC News):
A North Carolina man who survived a shooting in front of his house was shot to death two weeks later while he sat on his porch, police said.
Winston-Salem police said Demar Marquis Floyd, 27, was sitting on his porch Saturday night when the suspects drove by his house and opened fire, the Winston-Salem Journal reported Monday. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said several children were inside the house but were not hurt, and added that bullets also struck two other homes, but no one else was injured.
On March 26, someone drove past Floyd’s house and opened fire, hitting him in the torso, according to police, who said Floyd couldn’t provide investigators with any additional information and no witnesses could describe the vehicle.
Winston-Salem police are investigating, but so far, no arrests have been made. Police said the two shootings are connected but provided no other information about the possible connection.
And that’s just in the last couple of days in a way-small example space. America is one fucked-up gun-crazy place — of every 100 people in the US, there’s 120.5 guns, which is insane.
Despite a closed-off, locked-down pandemic, gun violence has gone even further mad — Time magazine at the end of last month:
Police and gun violence experts agree, warning that large-scale mass shootings — apart from the gun violence that has plagued U.S. cities through the pandemic — are inevitable as the weather warms and more people get vaccinated, enabling large gatherings in public spaces.
Some worry the attacks could return at a higher frequency, citing record gun sales in 2020.“We can expect that these kinds of shootings will unfortunately become more prevalent,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank.
“This is what normal has come to be like in America.”Despite a pandemic that kept much of the U.S. at home, 2020 was one of the nation’s most violent years in decades, experts say.
Homicides soared in many major cities. And more than 19,000 people were fatally shot in 2020 — the highest death toll in more than 20 years, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents. The nonprofit says there were more than 600 incidents in which four or more people were shot in 2020, which is nearly 50-percent more than the year before.With schools, movie theaters, concerts and other public venues mostly closed, though, COVID-19 largely gave Americans a respite from the types of active-shooter situations that plagued the U.S. pre-pandemic.
But as the nation inches closer to normality, gun-reform advocates warn a dramatic increase in gun sales will have lingering effects long after the coronavirus crisis is over.About 22.8 million firearms were sold in 2020, compared with 13.9 million the previous year, according to estimates by the Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting, an independent research firm.
In 2020, the FBI conducted more firearm background checks than any year on record—more than 39.6 million, data from the agency shows.
More than 8.4 million people in the U.S. became first-time gun owners last year, the National Shooting Sports Foundation says, adding that record sales have sparked ammunition shortages across the country.“My fear was that we would start to see these mass shootings again when we started to go out in public, and that is exactly what is happening,” says Shannon Watts, who founded the gun-control advocacy group Moms Demand Action.
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“We’re the only high-income country where recovering from a pandemic means shooting tragedies resume in public,” Watts says.
Only gun-nuts won’t allow any kind of control. We be fucked…
