While the world cowers in fear and western civilization mobilizes to destroy ISIS, another kind of terror continues unabated in America, becoming almost commonplace.
Of course I’m talking about mass shootings. Another of those senseless tragedies occurred yesterday at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. This time the toll was relatively modest – three people reported dead so far and nine hospitalized.
Police identified the shooter as 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear of North Carolina (photos above). No motive has been disclosed, but, according to the AP story, residents near a shack Dear occupied in Colorado describe him as being “slightly off.”
President Obama issued an obligatory statement calling once again for gun control.
“This is not normal,” the President said.
Imagine that. The President has to tell us that mass murder isn’t normal – however normal it may seem to have become.
It has been just three years since a deranged young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and slaughtered 20 children and six adults, before killing himself. Since then, there have been at least 1,029 mass shootings in America, with shooters killing at least 1,300 people and wounding 3,699 more.
That’s about a thousand more fatalities than the ISIS attack caused in Paris a couple of weekends ago. And they’re still agog over that tragedy on cable TV.
What will it take for homegrown mass murder to attract the same kind of horror and outrage?
What will it take for Americans to stand up to the National Rifle Association and to shame Congress into taking action?
If Newtown didn’t do it, and if all the horror inflicted by guns since then hasn’t done it, what will it take for Americans to say enough?
Map hows where mass murders have occurred since Newtown.
