Over the past seven days, America endured ten mass shootings that left at least 17 dead and 33 injured. These attacks bring the US mass shooting toll thus far in 2016 to 91 dead and 284 injured in 78 incidents. That body count surpasses the total death toll of the national spectacle that was the 51-day siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
The body count in America this week continues a recent spike in US mass shooting violence. It also marks the bloodiest seven-day span for such attacks in the nation since the week beginning February 20. But leaving aside the attack Friday morning in Piketon, Ohio, that left at least seven members of one family dead, the rest of this week’s tragedies received limited attention at best.
This is not the first week this year that a fairly large number of American mass shootings received little or no national scrutiny. On Saturday at about 2:00 AM, gunfire at a house party in Enterprise, Alabama, left four injured. That evening at about 5:50 pm, an argument on a street in Detroit, Michigan, escalated into a shooting that left one dead and four injured. Hours later, at about 9:30 PM, a volley unleashed upon a group of people outside an apartment complex in Orlando, Florida, left one dead and five injured. On Sunday around4:40 AM, disgruntled patrons firing into a strip club in Edinburg, Texas, killed one and injured six. Some twelve hours later, around 4:00 PM, a shooting at a home in Pelzer, South Carolina, left one dead and three injured. And on Monday evening, at about 8:45 PM, a street shooting in Long Beach, California, left another person dead and three more injured.
Still, some of the attacks this week, in addition to the still-unfolding terror in Piketon, seemed unique and horrific enough to draw more attention than they did. The standoff on Sunday morning between SWAT responders and a man in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ended with the discovery of three people, including the shooter’s brother, dead of shotgun wounds to the head in his home—as well as one individual injured outside. And on Tuesday, Chicago saw two mass shootings; the first, which occurred during the filming of a video for a local rap group, left one dead and four injured, while the second left one dead and three injured. These Chicago shootings came before the city hit 1,000 gunshot deaths and injuries in 2016 thus far, a drastic increase in gun violence over the same period in recent years. Read Full
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