When a gunman entered a California music bar this week and started firing, some of the patrons ran out of back doors, they smashed windows to escape, they hid. Unlike some mass shooting victims, they were not paralyzed by fear. But their quick action was not necessarily instinctive.
Several of those at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday had been through a mass shooting before — when a gunman opened fire on a crowd of country music fans in Las Vegas last year, killing 58.
“Unfortunately, these young people have learned that this may happen,” Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said following Wednesday’s shooting by a Marine combat veteran that left 12 dead in Thousand Oaks.
Even in a country that has become accustomed to gun massacres, the idea that some Americans have lived through not one, but two attacks is startling.
“It’s insane is the only way to describe it,” California’s Democratic Governor-elect Gavin Newsom said. “The normalization, that’s the only I can describe it. It’s become normalized.”
The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in which at least four people were shot or killed, said the Thousand Oaks assault was the 307th mass shooting this year.
In other words, a mass shooting takes place somewhere in America almost daily.
Back-to-back shootings have left many Americans feeling jaded to the horror, said Gregg Carter, a sociology professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island.
“A constant bombardment of bad news is unhealthy for us both mentally and physically,” he said.
“Americans are turning themselves off emotionally to mass shootings as a self-protection mechanism.”
A sort of switch-off can be seen in the media too.
Whereas a mass shooting used to dominate the news cycle for a week or more and garner saturation cable news coverage, such incidents nowadays are receiving much less air time.
This “public fatigue or fatalism” is partly due to a barrage of other big events crowding out the story, and partly it’s because political debate about how to address the problem is stuck, noted Robert Spitzer, political science professor at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. — AFP
Charlotte Plantive, Thomas Watkins
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