1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Untold Damage
Untold Damage: America’s
Overlooked Gun Violence
Most shootings with four deaths or injuries
are invisible outside their communities.
And most of the lives they scar are black.
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, DANIELA PORAT and AGUSTIN ARMENDARIZMAY 22, 2016
CINCINNATI
— After the slaughter of nine worshipers at a South Carolina church last June, but before the massacre of eight students and a teacher at an Oregon community college in October, there was a shooting that the police here have labeled Incident 159022597.01. It happened on a clear Friday night at an Elks Lodge, on a modest block of clapboard houses northeast of this city’s hilly downtown. Unlike the butchery that bookended it, it merited no presidential statements, no saturation television coverage.
But what took place at 6101 Prentice Street on Aug. 21 may say more about the nature of gun violence in the United States than any of those far more famous rampages. It is a snapshot of a different sort of mass violence — one that erupts with such anesthetic regularity that it is rendered almost invisible, except to the mostly black victims, survivors and attackers.
According to the police account, more than 30 people had gathered in the paneled basement bar of the lodge to mark the 39th birthday of a man named Greg Wallace when a former neighbor, Timothy Murphy, showed up, drunk. Fists flew. Mr. Murphy ducked out the door, burst back in with a handgun, and opened fire.
As partygoers scrambled for the door, he chased Greg Wallace’s younger brother Dawaun to a tiny black-and-white-tiled bathroom, where he shot him nine times before the violence spilled out onto the street. There, another Wallace relative, also armed with a handgun, fired back at him.
By the end, 27 bullets had flown, hitting seven people: Mr. Murphy, who died; Dawaun Wallace, who was grievously wounded; four bystanders, one of whom was hit in the genitals, another in the leg.
And Barry Washington.
A seasonal packer for Amazon.com, Mr. Washington, 56, had stopped at the lodge on his way to the store for cigarettes, said his sister, Jaci Washington. He was in the bathroom when Mr. Murphy cornered Dawaun Wallace there. A single bullet pierced Mr. Washington’s arm, then his heart.
He left behind a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a mother and four grandchildren.
“My brother died on the floor of a bathroom for no reason,” Ms. Washington said. “He had nothing to do with the whole situation. I can’t believe I lost my brother like this.”
Yet many in the neighborhood where they grew up, she said, responded with a shrug. “The reality is, this happens quite frequently,” she said. “And it’s kind of, ‘Oh, well, this guy was killed today. Somebody else will be killed tomorrow.’ ”
That is more than correct. The Elks Lodge episode was one of at least 358 armed encounters nationwide last year — nearly one a day, on average — in which four or more people were killed or wounded, including attackers. The toll: 462 dead and 1,330 injured, sometimes for life, typically in bursts of gunfire lasting but seconds.
In some cities, law enforcement officials say a growing share of shootings involve more than one victim, possibly driven by increased violence between street gangs. But data are scarce.
Seeking deeper insight into the phenomenon, The New York Times identified and analyzed these 358 shootings with four or more casualties, drawing on two databases assembled from news reports and citizen contributors, and then verifying details with law enforcement agencies.
Only a small handful were high-profile mass shootings like those in South Carolina and Oregon. The rest are a pencil sketch of everyday America at its most violent.
They chronicle how easily lives are shattered when a firearm is readily available — in a waistband, a glove compartment, a mailbox or garbage can that serves as a gang’s gun locker. They document the mayhem spawned by the most banal of offenses: a push in a bar, a Facebook taunt, the wrong choice of music at a house party. They tally scores of unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time: an 11-month-old clinging to his mother’s hip, shot as she prepared to load him into a car; a 77-year-old church deacon, killed by a stray bullet while watching television on his couch.
Continued
Last edited by Goose (5/23/2016 5:15 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- tennyson
- Exchanger
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Re: Untold Damage
And for most of the incidents described there is NO answer via gun legislation. As long as people even THINK of using a gun to settle an argument or ANYTHING OTHER than for life threatening protection, we have a situation that requires a change in thinking that IMHO is NOT going to happen.
The notion nowadays is also selling fear that in itself begets more people getting guns and carrying them into situations that they likely would have been better off without them.
We likely have more guns per capita than most nations and are reaping the consequence of people carrying who are not emotionally equipped (or properly trained) to do so.
The 2nd Amendment is NOT going away and other than passing legislation that keeps more people who LEGALLY should NOT have a gun, this is the way it is going to be. As a matter of fact the politics around this whole thing in terms of claiming one side wants to suspend the 2nd Amendment is ridiculous and its intent is just a gift to the gun lobby (and they know and welcome it).
If someone thinks there is an answer to the type of killings and shootings mainly described in the article I would like to hear it, but I don't think there is one (other than whatever background checks might do to keep the guns out of hands of people who legally should not have had them).
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Re: Untold Damage
It is amazing, and depressing just how squalid and petty the circumstances are under which these tragedies play out.
Another excerpt:
Minor Dust-Ups, Answered With Bullets
Droves of experts study high-profile massacres by so-called lone-wolf assailants, usually driven by mental disorders, at schools, workplaces and other public spaces. Academics regularly crunch data on single homicides and assaults. But the near-daily shootings that wound or kill several victims — a relatively small subset of the shootings that kill nearly 11,000 people and wound roughly 60,000 more each year — are uncharted territory for researchers, said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.The Times compiled its list of 358 shootings with four or more casualties from largely crowd-sourced lists managed by the social media network Reddit and Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization.
The groups recently combined their efforts at the website gunviolencearchive.org.Four or more casualties is a far broader measure than “mass shootings,” which are commonly defined as the killing of at least four people, not including the attacker. But it captures many victims who some criminologists say are too often ignored: people who might have died given a slightly different trajectory of a bullet, or less-sophisticated medical care.Counting assailants among casualties increased the total number of cases by fewer than three dozen, most of them domestic violence shootings that ended in suicide.
Hispanics were not separately identified, because police reports do not systematically identify victims and suspects by ethnicity, only by race.There are 358 reasons for those 358 shootings, though some remain a mystery; in about a fourth of the cases, investigators have discerned no motive.As for the rest, some patterns stand out. The fewest occurred while another felony, such as a burglary, was underway. Domestic violence shootings were nearly as infrequent, but were among the deadliest.
About a third were provoked by arguments, typically drug- or alcohol-fueled, often over petty grievances.
Last edited by Goose (5/23/2016 7:36 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- •
Thread Starter- Just Fred
- Duke of Cortona
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Re: Untold Damage
It seems the gun, originally designed to be used for hunting and self-protection, has morphed into a tool used to settle disputes and arguments. I'm beginning to think 'gun rights' is more of a cultural issue than a second amendment issue.