Unhappy New Year
California has kicked off 2023 with a bang: two mass shootings in 72 hours. (Mass shootings constitute events in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the murderer.) This has probably been the country’s most massacre-intensive January ever – and certainly since the Gun Violence Archive started tracking this data in 2014. Only a small fraction of these nearly twice-daily horrors (647 in 2022) gets much media coverage. Still, this seems like a nightmarish Groundhog Day.
Over the course of nearly nine years, the satirical, fake news outlet the Onion has regularly summarized such slaughters 30 times with the same headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
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