Mass shootings have become all-too commonplace in America. But even by our nation’s uniquely violent standards, the multiplicity of shootings that spread across the country like a tornado-driven wildfire this past weekend was mind-numbing.
First there was the shooting last Thursday night in a bar in California by a former police sergeant, who shot and killed his ex-wife and several others, in an apparent fit of domestic rage.
Then on Friday evening, there was the shooting at a high school football game in Oklahoma that claimed the life of a 16 year-old boy.
A few hours later, the rampage of shooting jumped east to Boston on Saturday morning, when gunfire among a group of young men left seven persons injured in the vicinity of the annual Caribbean Festival in Dorchester.
A few hours later, the inferno of tragedy veered south with the news from Maryland that a 34-year-old man shot his mother, cousin, and nephew before turning the gun on himself.
And then came the reports Saturday afternoon from Jacksonville, Florida, of the race-motivated shooting by a 20 year-old white supremacist (who espoused Nazi-style views) in which he targeted and killed three Black persons in a Dollar General store with an AR-15.
The spate of gun violence in a 48-hour period this past week demonstrated that no part of America is immune to the tragic consequences of our gun culture — and as long as Republican lawmakers are beholden to gun owners’ groups and refuse to pass even common-sense gun safety legislation, there will be no end in sight to the sort of senseless and horrific shootings that ripped across America this past weekend.
