US on way to set record for mass killings

LOS ANGELES — The United States is setting a record pace for mass killings this year, replaying the horror on a loop roughly once a week in 2023.

Eighty-eight lives have been lost in 17 mass killings over 111 days. Each time the killers wielded firearms. Only 2009 was marked by as many such deaths in as short a time.

Among the shootings have been children at a grade school in Nashville, Tennessee, being gunned down on an otherwise ordinary Monday; farmworkers being sprayed with bullets over a workplace grudge in Northern California; and dancers at a ballroom outside Los Angeles being shot dead as they celebrated the Chinese Lunar New Year.

Just two weeks ago four partygoers, ranging in age from 17 to 23, were killed and 32 injured in Dadeville, Alabama, when bullets rained down on a Sweet 16 celebration.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said on Thursday that a 15-year-old from Tuskegee, Alabama, had been arrested, the sixth person charged in the case, but court records were not made public because of the person's age. All six face reckless murder charges over the shooting.

"Nobody should be shocked," said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was one of 17 people killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. "I visit my daughter in a cemetery. Outrage doesn't begin to describe how I feel."

The Parkland victims are among the 2,842 people who have died in mass killings in the US since 2006, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today, in partnership with Northeastern University in Boston. It counts killings involving four or more deaths, not including the perpetrator, the same standard used by the FBI, and tracks a number of variables for each.

The bloodshed represents just a fraction of the fatal violence that occurs in the US annually. Yet mass killings are happening with alarming frequency this year: an average of once every 6.53 days, according to The AP/USA Today analysis.

This year's figures stand out even more when they are compared with the tally for full-year totals since data were first collected. The US recorded 30 or fewer mass killings in more than half of the years in the database, so to be at 17 less than a third of the way through is remarkable.

From coast to coast the violence occurs in a wide range of circumstances and with various motives. They include murder-suicide and domestic violence, gang retaliation, school shootings and workplace vendettas. All have taken the lives of four or more people at once since Jan 1.

Barriers remain

Yet the violence continues and barriers to change remain. The likelihood of Congress reinstating a ban on semiautomatic rifles appears remote, and the US Supreme Court set new standards for reviewing the country's gun laws last year, calling into question firearms restrictions across the country.

"Here's the reality: If somebody is determined to commit mass violence, they're going to," said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium of the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York state. "And it's our role as society to try and put up obstacles and barriers to make that more difficult."

However, there is little indication at either the state or federal level that many major policy changes are on the horizon.

Experts and advocates decry the proliferation of guns in the US in recent years, including record sales during the first year of the pandemic.

"We have to know that this isn't the way to live," said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety in New York. "We don't have to live this way. And we cannot live in a country with an agenda of guns everywhere, every place and every time."

Agencies via Xinhua