Why all the mass shootings?
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To the editor:
As the country struggles to make sense of another mass shooting, this time at a “Sweet Sixteen” party Saturday night that killed four people in Dadeville, Alabama, law enforcement tries to find a motive.
Law enforcement has been unable to determine a motive for the Nashville Christian School shooting or the Louisville Bank shooting.
Mass shootings seem to be largely an American phenomenon. Why?
We can look to the principle of Occam’s Razor that the simplest answer is probably the most correct.
Why someone like 64 year old Stephen Paddock who killed 60 people and wounded as many 413 from a 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, might be simply that he was just exercising his second amendment rights, as was Connor Sturgeon in Louisville and Audrey Hale in Nashville.
After Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after Uvalde, and Nashville, as a nation we were asked do we value kids more than guns? At the 2023 NRA Convention, a number of political figures said “No” guns were more important than the lives of the 6,000 children killed by gun violence in 2022 or the 469 who have died so far in 2023.
Touting the power of the gun lobby over political leaders, NRA President Wayne LaPirerre boasted that “gun hating politicians should never go to bed unafraid of what this association and all of our millions of members, can do to their political careers.”
Mary
Kathryn Gepner
Benton
