It’s interesting to think about how gun violence is so common in the US that it’s become local news. You only get brief national coverage if you mass-murder a large gathering of people. School shootings are now so common that they rise to national news if the death count rises above a dozen or so kids. There were 83 school shootings in the 2000’s. There were 264 shootings in the 2010’s. There have been 181 so far in the 2020’s. We’re well on track to double the 10’s number by the end of the decade. More than 200 kids murdered in schools in the 2010’s. How many did you heard about?

And that’s just school shootings. The national level of people not murdered by police is far higher. There were 21,000 homicides by guns in 2021 alone. We don’t call police-caused deaths “murder,” but the nicely qualified “justifiable homocides,” but in 2019, cops added another 1,000 people shot and killed by police to that number. It’s a lot harder to get at totals when it involves law enforcement.

Anyway, it’s rather incredible to me that murder has become so mundane. Or maybe it always has been, and it requires a Lizzy Borden situation to make national news.