When a gunman entered a California music bar this week and started firing, some of the patrons ran out of back doors, they smashed windows to escape, they hid.
Unlike some mass shooting victims, they were not paralyzed by fear.
However, their quick action was not necessarily instinctive. Several of those at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday had been through a mass shooting before — when a gunman opened fire on a crowd of country music fans in Las Vegas last year, killing 58.
Photo: AFP
“Unfortunately, these young people have learned that this may happen,” Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said following Wednesday’s shooting by a US Marine combat veteran that left 12 dead in Thousand Oaks.
Even in a country that has become accustomed to gun massacres, the idea that some Americans have lived through not one, but two attacks is startling.
“It’s insane is the only way to describe it,” California’s Democratic Governor-elect Gavin Newsom said. “The normalization, that’s the only I can describe it. It’s become normalized.”
The southern California slaughter came on the heels of another massacre, when Robert Bowers, who openly spewed extreme anti-Semitic invective, allegedly burst into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 Jewish worshipers.
The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in which at least four people were shot or killed, said the Thousand Oaks assault was the 307th mass shooting in the US this year.
In other words, a mass shooting takes place somewhere in the US almost daily.
Back-to-back shootings have left many Americans feeling jaded to the horror, said Gregg Carter, a sociology professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island.
“A constant bombardment of bad news is unhealthy for us both mentally and physically,” he told reporters. “Americans are turning themselves off emotionally to mass shootings as a self-protection mechanism.”
A sort of switch-off can be seen in the media too.
Whereas a mass shooting used to dominate the news cycle for a week or more and garner saturation cable news coverage, such incidents nowadays are receiving much less air time.
This “public fatigue or fatalism” is partly due to a barrage of other big events crowding out the story and partly it is because political debate about how to address the problem is stuck, said Robert Spitzer, political science professor at the State University of New York, College at Cortland.
Gun rights are enshrined in the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution and Republicans are loathe to discuss any sort of gun control, often reacting to gun violence by offering “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, but little else.
“However, the gun issue is more on the minds of voters than ever, and there is good reason to believe that support for stronger gun laws is a winning issue for candidates this year,” Spitzer told reporters.
The mother of a young man who survived last year’s massacre in Las Vegas, only to be killed by the California gunman, made an impassioned plea for gun control.
“I don’t want prayers, I don’t want thoughts, I want gun control and I hope to God nobody else sends me more prayers. I want gun control. No. More. Guns,” said Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, whose son Telemachus was a 27-year US Navy veteran.
Another somber reflection of the US’ mass shooting crisis can be seen around Washington and across the country, where flags on government property are flying at half-mast.
In a flag-obsessed nation, the frequency with which the national flag flutters in mourning is hard not to notice.
When it was lowered on Thursday, barely a week had gone by since it was raised again following the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. A look at past presidential proclamations ordering the flag down shows that it has been at half-mast for 19 days so far this year after mass shootings, compared with 15 days for all other reasons combined.
Fear is growing, Carter said, pointing to a Gallup poll after the Las Vegas shooting found that 40 percent of Americans are “worried” that they or a family member will become a mass-shooting victim.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was