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COSMOS -- a summer of STEM
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Breaking misconceptions about OCD and anxiety PAGE 8
Genderfluid flows through PAGE 7 Carlmont
THE
How the Super Bowl will affect the Bay Area
Carlmont High School — Belmont, California
January 2016 Vol VII Issue IV
www.scotscoop.com twitter: @scotscoopnews
Gun violence sees no ceasefire Mass shootings become an everyday affair
Avery Adams
As an elementary school kid, you liberally strutted your rainbow polka-dotted or race car backpack through the halls everyday. But in our current society, some children are being advised to turn to a new style of bags: bullet proof backpacks. In 1980, the United States’ average of mass killings per decade spiked and has continued to rise. There have been at least 62 mass shootings in the past three decades, 24 of them occurring in the last seven years, according to a recent Mother Jones survey. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) define a mass public shooting as an attack in which four or more people are killed in a single incident involving guns in a public place, such as a workplace or a school. This excludes familyrelated and crime-related mass shootings. “Hate for different groups, or different religions [can influence mass shootings]; most seem to relate to racial differences. Terrorism is a big part as well. People want to make their point. Most people that shoot [a gun] get a lot of attention, especially in mass shootings. Maybe they are not taken seriously in society and that is the only way they can get attention—on a huge scale,” said sophomore Liam Gunning. The largest of those 62 mass public shootings—the ones with victims in the double digits—such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut resulting in 26 dead, have occurred only 13 times since 1966. However, seven of those 13 large shootings occurred between 2007 and 2013, while the other six were spread out over the previous four decades. These mass shootings have occurred even as the nation’s overall violent crime and homicide rates decreased. Single-victim gun killings have dropped more than 40 percent since 1980, according to 2010 FBI crime data. But the total number of people dying in mass shootings
has risen from an average of 161 each year in the 1980s to 163 between 2006 and 2008, according to FBI statistics. “Recent incidents make it seem as if rampages are on the rise, but they have been a fact of life for a long time and will remain that way,” said Jack Levin, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and author of “Extreme Killing.” According to the Harvard School of Public Health, the rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011. A similar report recently published by the CRS shows the frequency of mass attacks has increased to every 74 days this decade, compared with 282 days between mass killings in the 1970s. Although some studies have shown the increase of mass shooting incidents through recent years, some professionals suggest that the rise is not as abrupt as the media portrays. “These decade-long averages suggest that the prevalence, if not the deadliness, of ‘mass public shootings’ increased in the 1970s and 1980s, and continued to increase, but not as steeply, during the 1990s, 2000s and first four years of the 2010s,” said the CRS report authors, William Krouse and Daniel Richardson. Mass public attacks have been in the news recently after high-profile shooting sprees in 2015, such as in Charleston, South Carolina, where a historically black church was the target, and in San Bernardino, California, where a couple opened fire on a holiday party. The CRS said those were part of a “rash of shootings” that have captured the public’s attention due to the seeming randomness of these attacks. “Mass shootings are part of the new reality. It’s just going to happen. Hearing about school shootings—and it is possible that we have [previously] heard about them—is now just a part of our normal agendas. [We] seem to be waiting until it reaches [us],” said history teacher Gregory Schoenstein. By breaking down the data by decade, the CRS researchers concluded that things are getting worse regard-
ing mass shootings, though the rise isn’t as bad as it was several decades ago. “People worry about media bias. If people bought stories about the majority of the stuff that happens in a given day, such as all the happy, peaceable stuff, [people would be bored].” Maybe we are wired to be on the lookout for danger or threats that seem disastrous,” said Schoenstein. Ted Alcorn, a researcher for Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization dedicated to gun control laws, analyzed the mass shootings between July 2009 and July 2015. Contrary to several other reports, Alcorn concluded that mass shootings are not on the rise at all; they’ve plateaued. According to the analysis, 130 people were killed in mass shootings in 2009. In 2012, even with Aurora and Newtown, two of the most violent mass attacks, 112 people were killed in mass shootings. Meanwhile, in 2015, there were 66 deaths from 13 mass shootings up until July. Gunning said, “It feels like almost everyday I go on the news and see another mass shooting, nothing [changes]; everything is about mass shootings. I feel like it is a norm now, seeing a mass shooting.” Although attention has been recently brought to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is near an all-time low in the United States, according to political scientist Patrick Egan. A recent General Social Survey report revealed that compared to the 1970s when about half of all American households owned at least one gun, only 31 percent owned a firearm in 2014. “When there’s, on average, 21 mass shootings every year, whether statistically significant or not, that’s very significant in terms of lives lost and for us as a society,” said Mike McLively, an attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “We can all agree that’s extremely significant that it’s happening with such frequency.” PHOTO BY MINH-HAN VU