I’ve been thinking about this spree of gun violence in schools.
Something changed in 1982.
- There have been 19 mass shootings during the last 36 years.
- There were two mass shootings during the previous 33 years.
Up until the 1982 Wilkes-Barre shootings, there were two (!) mass shootings in the US: the 1949 Camden shooting and the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting.
What has changed since I was in junior high and high school in the 1970s? It was common to have guys with shotguns hanging in the back of their truck windows parked in the school parking lot. Guns were aplenty, readily available to teens back then than they are today.
So what has changed? It’s not the guns. It’s not the ammo. It’s not the magazines.
Until Americans come to grips with the root cause and what has really changed, they will keep trying to treat the symptoms and not the disease.
The disease is us, not the guns.
The other common factor with every mass shooting (that I am aware of) since 1982 is that the shooter was on anti-depressants.
This is the conversation that we need to have, not about guns themselves.
