gbaji wrote:
We can assume that's a coincidence and that our society is just getting more violent, or people are just more insane than they used to be. Or we can speculate that by creating gun free zones, we've made it possible for a shooter to calmly and slowly walk through an area shooting indiscriminately. He knows he's got time before the cops show up. So he doesn't have to barricade himself in a tower, or shoot a target and then run. I think it's hard to argue that this doesn't have an effect on the nature of the shootings that occur. We've made it easier to do this, so why be surprised when people start doing it more often. There have always been deranged people. And they've always had access to weapons they can use to hurt other people. But with this law, we gave those people a set of perfect locations in which to exact whatever nutty death fantasy they have. Why be surprised that the number of instances of this keep increasing?
We should probably be more concerned that there isn't a set criteria for defining what a mass shooting is amongst media peoples. So you can have this graph, and this graph, which can be accompanied by insightful articles that draw completely opposite conclusions.
