Two teenaged boys riding in the back of a school bus stand up with AR-15 style automatic rifles and proceed to fire on the other students in the bus. Ultimately, 10 students were murdered by the two, who managed to keep police at bay with their superior firepower. This assault on the peace was not in real life, but an event written for and depicted in an episode of the murder/mystery show “Murder In The First” that I was watching on the streaming platform Hulu. The episode originally aired in June 2015. Approximately 39 mass shootings would occur after the airing of that episode.
One of the first mass shootings to startle us and capture our attention was in 1999, when two young men murdered 13 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Perhaps that incident was the inspiration for the TV series’ episode, but since then there have been at least 7 mass shootings at elementary and high schools with 92 lives taken by the shooters, including those who died at the hands of an 18-year-old gunman who, using a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle, murdered 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde Texas. But other murders have taken place. On May 14th of this year, an 18-year-old man walked into a Buffalo New York grocery store and killed 10 people. He was wielding a semi-automatic weapon with an extended magazine, designed to deliver many bullets. He was also clad in body armor.
Themes have emerged: The attacker who killed 13 people in April 2009 at Binghamton, NY used a large-capacity magazine. In November of that year, an attacker using a large-capacity magazine, murdered 12 people who were visiting a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. 49 people were killed in June 2016 at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida by an attacker using a weapon with a large-capacity magazine. 58 people were murdered at a music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017, by a person using a weapon with a large-capacity magazine. A month later, in November 2017, 25 more humans died at the hands of a person wielding a weapon with a large-capacity magazine. Again, a large-capacity magazine was fitted onto the weapon an attacker used to slay 12 human beings at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California in November 2018. Gunmen using weapons with large-capacity magazines killed 12 people in Virginia Beach in May 2019, and 23 people in El Paso Texas in August 2019.
On a recent episode of “The People’s Court,” a young man from Florida sued another man for return of the money he had paid for the construction and sale of an AR-15 rifle. The seller was to build the rifle for the young man, who was 19 at the time of the contract. Judge Marilyn Milian noted that Florida raised the age for the legal purchase of that type of weapon from 18 years old, to 21, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in April 2018. A legally purchased AR-15 semi-automatic rifle was used by an expelled student to kill 17 people. In October 2018, a gunman with a semi-automatic weapon and a large capacity magazine killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, near where I studied with an architect when I was a teenager.
In his poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Randall Jarrell wrote, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” Discuss among yourselves whether we should continue to be content to clean up after these gunmen, with their automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines.
cjon3acd@att.net