Stephan: I spent some time today going through the English language world press. Something has happened, is happening, something very precious is being lost. What America has meant to the world for all of my life is fading. The stories now are not of opportunity, technological breakthroughs, leadership in civil rights. They are of child concentration camps, White supremacy, nativism, and danger.
Down to advice that if you are going to the United States, and plan to attend public events, that you rate safety with what the president has recently said. What else is there to be said. As this report lays out, since 1 January, today the 4th of August, the 216th day of the year there have been 251 mass gun murders in the country. In a week we have had three such mass killings, Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton.
St Pius X Church held a vigil for victims after the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday.
Credit: Mario Tama/Getty
It was a particularly deadly 24 hours in the United States as a shooting spree early Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, which left at least 10 dead, including the gunman, took place less than a day after a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and killed at least 20 people. The violence in Dayton, which took place on the 216th day of the year, marked the 251stmass shooting of 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit organization counts as a mass shooting any incident in which four or more people were shot or killed, without including the shooter.
It would seem that all these stories of mass shootings, foreign military interventions, tainted food, environmental destruction and hatred of the “other” is our collective expression of fear and our grasping for safety. Meanwhile the rich get richer playing us all for fun and profit.
The USA has spread death and destruction around the world for some time and now we are paying our karmic debts. Now we are doing to ourselves what we have done to others in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, …. Innocent lives are taken here and all over the world, really collective madness. I think we are coming to a point of national awakening or destruction. This country has been so rich for so long that our culture is almost completely entranced by the material world except when horrific events pierce the heart and wake us up to love and care for each other.
There is a lot of violence and death around and about the planet these days. Since death is unavoidable young or old, violent or not we are left with the in-between time which right now is very discouraging.
The same day of the Dayton mass shooting, there were 45 individuals who were shot and died in Chicago. Reading that, I thought that although they were individual shootings, they were in toto, a mass shooting. What would the daily numbers be if we were to count them that way?