Gun Violence
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold inaugurated a new era with the massacre of twelve schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Denver suburb. There had been campus killings before that—perhaps most notably the August 1, 1966, massacre perpetrated by Charles Whitman from the top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. But whereas Whitman worked as a sniper, killing 16 over the course of 90 minutes, Harris and Klebold moved from room to room with automatic rifles.
Or at least that’s what I thought, before I started playing around with Wikipedia’s table of deadliest US mass shootings: re-ordering the table by year, I find that Harris and Klebold were far from the first to use military-assault-style tactics. So I’m eager to get you all looking into the data and at opinion pieces and find out what insights you can offer.
for HW, do one of the following:
- Using Wikipedia’s table of mass shootings as your starting point, identify and discuss a pattern you see in the methods, ideology and/or frequency of mass shootings. One option might be to focus on a particular target: for example, schools or workplaces. Don’t clutter up your response with 10 links, but do use details from some of the instances to illustrate the pattern and (hopefully) offer some insight into the nature of these tragedies.
- Look into the political furor sparked by the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland Florida. Several options: report on how students from the high school organized and (for a few weeks) held the national spotlight on the topic of gun control; report on the political furor that resulted, the back-and-forth between gun control advocates and opponents.
- Find and highlight an interesting or insightful opinion piece on the topic of gun control and/or mass shootings. For example, the generally liberal but always unconventional thinker Malcolm Gladwell argued a few years back in the New Yorker that mass shootings are best thought of as a self-perpetuating fad.