Rounds and rounds: Mass killings cannot be a part of life

In a country that sees itself as a global outlier — the ultimate home of innovation, artistic pursuit, commerce, science — we love to break records. There are some, though, that we keep breaking when we really shouldn’t, among them our consistent over-achievement in the field of mass shootings.

In the first six months of this year, there were 28 such mass killings, in which four or more people (excluding the attacker) are killed in one incident, according to data maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox. That’s one more than the 27 that took place in the first half of 2022, already a record. To see the map of killings is to see a problem of incomprehensible scale that touches on communities of all types: wealthy and poor, coastal and landlocked, politically conservative and liberal, Black and white and Hispanic and Asian.

The through-line is someone — usually male, usually young — with a twisted motivation and, most importantly, the means to carry out a perceived retribution for warped grievances. There are scattered incidents involving stabbings and vehicular homicide, but the vast majority of the killings involve guns. While the deadliest and most widely noted often result from the now-infamous AR-15 and its many variants, the majority of mass killers use handguns, which flow even more freely than the assault rifle that has become practically synonymous with mass murder.

Shootings that “only” take the lives of four or five people go practically unnoticed outside of some local news coverage. Insofar as we talk about them we discuss them in the aggregate, as instances of a collective problem; each set of killings is individually now just the drumbeat of American life. In this way, our efforts have already failed. The horror has become routine, the deaths expected.

Yet we can’t give up, shouldn’t accept the new reality. No matter what the gun cultists say, this is a solvable problem, if only we can reconsider our priorities. Life or guns. We have to choose.