When most of us think of April, we associate it with spring. But for researchers who study extremism and violence, the month has other, darker connotations: “We sometimes refer to April as the beginning of the killing season,” one told the Washington Post in 2016.
This year appears no different. Four people were killed and 28 injured this weekend when a shooter opened fire at a Sweet 16 birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more mass shootings than days so far this year: The Dadeville incident was the 159th mass shooting of 2023, following recent shootings in Louisville, Kentucky, which killed seven people in total, and at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, which killed six people — three of them children.
“What has our nation come to when children cannot attend a birthday party without fear?” President Biden said in a statement responding to the Alabama killings.
It has come to this: Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among US kids and teens. Amid an overall increase in gun deaths over the last two decades, the number of children killed by guns soared between 2019 and 2021, increasing a shocking 50 percent.
Details about the victims of this weekend’s shooting are still trickling out, and very little has been revealed about the shooter. One of the teenagers who died, Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, the brother of the birthday girl, was a football player who had just committed to a college when his life was cut short. Another, KeKe Nicole Smith, was a volleyball player, remembered by a coach as “full of life.”
KeKe, Phil, and the other victims in Dadeville shouldn’t have died like this. And we shouldn’t have to live like this.
Every year, communities across the United States experience preventable shootings because the country has too many guns and not enough regulation on their access. Guns kill more than 40,000 Americans a year, in an epidemic that disproportionately…
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