Five people were shot and killed Friday night, including an 8-year-old, in a mass shooting that occurred at a Cleveland, Texas home after neighbors asked the shooter to stop firing his assault rifle in his front yard because their baby was trying to sleep.
The incident in Cleveland is America’s 174th mass shooting — an incident during which four or more people are shot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — since the beginning of 2023.
It follows mass shootings at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama; a bank in Louisville, Kentucky; at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee; at Michigan State University; at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, California; and at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California.
These shootings come in the wake of numerous others last year including at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia; at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado; on a school bus allegedly targeting members of the University of Virginia football team; a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois; at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm.
“America is unique in that…
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