The Fourth of July — Revisited
On the night of the Fourth, I had made my very first post on this website as an introduction, titled, “The Fourth of July”. The post goes into detail about how America’s mass shooting epidemic has gotten so out of control, that Homeland Security warned Americans about extremist violence such as gun violence and terror attacks on the holiday as COVID restrictions are being lifted. As I continue in my own post, my activities didn’t involve leaving my own house much. Not that I was scared of gun violence, as I live in a dangerous neighborhood notorious for the sound of daily gunfire. And I wasn’t particularly scared when I checked the gun violence archives and I discovered that there was a shooting in my city that left 8 people wounded.
After night fell, I checked the archives one more time. It had “only” shown that about four or five mass shootings occurred that day. I was relieved, but foolish enough to let my guard down. I hadn’t taken into consideration just how hard and long it takes to update these archives, so I assumed that we had a quiet holiday compared to some of the mass shooting clusters I detailed in my previous post. But I wasn’t prepared to hear the news about just how many shootings occurred over the Fourth of July weekend overall the next morning when I checked the news.
According to CNN, at least 150 people were fatally shot in more than 400 shootings over the Fourth of July weekend. That is a large jump from the fatal weekend in Chicago not too long ago that left 77 people wounded in a single weekend. According to the news article: “In New York, where gun violence has been rising to levels not seen in years, there were 26 victims from 21 shootings from Friday to Sunday, […] On July 4, the city experienced 12 shooting incidents that involved 13 victims, an increase from last year when there were eight shootings and eight victims, according to the NYPD.”
The news article goes on and on to detail the most gruesome attacks that have happened over the weekend, from Dallas/Fort Worth, to Atlanta, to Chicago, to Ohio, and Virginia. CNN defines these mass shootings as “… an incident with four or more people killed or wounded by gunfire, excluding the shooter.” As someone who has been studying gun violence for only 7 years, I don’t think I can say that I have ever seen this much gun violence in a single weekend. Or even a week.
Allow for me to put this into more perspective: there have been more mass shootings in a single weekend than there are days in the year. This excludes the 272+ mass shootings that have made headlines since the start of this year. So therefore, we have had approximately two mass shootings on average per day. But what about those that don’t make major headlines? The gun violence that gets swept under the rug because it’s so typical for the area in which it happened? Surely we are all underestimating just how many mass shootings occur each day, and have occurred since that start of the year, if we are to go by CNN’s definition of a mass shooting.
Sometimes, in the areas like the ones where I live — where gun violence is so rampant that the police don’t even bother responding to incidents until hours later, if at all — or it’s not uncommon to walk past several bodies on the ground covered in blue tarp, laying there for hours as the police lazily conduct their jobs that they are ill-equipped to handle for these very circumstances, these incidents don’t make the news at all. Sometimes they are not even considered to be “mass shootings” because they do not fit the infinitely changing definition of what constitutes as a “mass shooting” in the first place.
So take the time to imagine the gun violence that does get reported. Imagine, if we all went by CNN’s definition and standards of what is considered a mass shooting, just how many per year — per weekend — that we have. We are now at approximately 700 reported mass shootings since the start of this year, with 400 of them occurring in this past weekend alone. Now imagine what that number would be if, say, the universal definition of a mass shooting was perhaps only two or more people wounded or killed, either including or excluding the shooter.
Can you imagine what that number would be right now? Can you imagine how many are actually occurring every single day, slipped under the rug because the number of fatalities or injured people isn’t significant enough to bother making a headline about it? The only news on your feed would be of mass shootings. Every ten or twenty minutes or so, likely even less, you would scroll past yet another story of a mass shooting.
It’s no wonder major news channels and articles have to set a higher limit somewhere. Writers and reporters wouldn’t be able to gather the necessary information to report on every single mass shooting that occurs fast enough before the next one occurred, and the cycle repeats. We as human beings would not be able to handle the news of a yet another mass shooting every five minutes or less. We can hardly handle the news of our current epidemic now; we have become desensitized to it. It’s only natural. The brain is protecting us from being exposed to too much negative information, and we end up with what is known as sympathy fatigue to block out the stress and anxiety of hearing about tragedy after tragedy.
I believe that if we were to be able to report on every single mass shooting and lowered the criteria for what constitutes as one, more action would be taken. More law enforcement would be trained and equipped to prevent them from happening before they do, or handle them efficiently as are happening. More accessible mental health resources would be in place for those struggling with homicidal and suicidal ideation, or even just uncontrollable anger and triggers that could lead to someone committing a mass shooting. Perhaps, there would be better gun reform and restrictions.
This is just the tip of the ice berg for potential solutions to this problem. As I have previously said, the solutions to our problem is not so black and white, but it isn’t impossible to figure out either. The answers are right in front of our faces; experts have spent longer than I have researching this phenomena and know much more in-depth than I do, and they have many of the answers and solutions just waiting to be acknowledged and used. The question is, when will these solutions be acknowledged? When will we finally decide to take the proper steps to putting an end to this madness? Who will be the ones to take action and start making some changes?
Once we answer these questions, then perhaps we can start making some real change. Perhaps there will come a day where less and less people are losing their loved ones to gun violence, no matter what form it takes.
