Bronx Subway and Columbia Mall Shootings Require Immediate Action

The headlines are shocking. In less than a week, twenty people were shot in two incidents of gun violence.

• In the Bronx, 33 shots fired; ten people hit; zero fatalities.
• In Columbia, SC, ten people shot; zero fatalities.

These cases can’t help but raise new questions for us as a nation. Questions like…

Did our mass shooters forget how to aim?

Adam Lanza killed all but two of the people he shot. Omar Mateen gave up some accuracy, but more than made up for it in total fatalities: 50 dead, 53 wounded. Seng-Hui? 32 dead, seventeen wounded. Now THAT’S how you commit mass murder. The Bronx subway shooter’s use of smoke grenades had a nice note of theatricality to it, but how can you expect to hit what you can’t see? Such a strange and sloppy choice.

Have our mass shooters forgotten how to shop?

Frank James fired a 9MM Glock handgun inside that subway car. No wonder no one died. How did he overlook the fact that he could have bought a high-velocity rifle instead of a handgun? With the hardware available to us as Americans, he could have ensured that even a bad shot caused grievous injuries. Kyle Rittenhouse never would have settled for zero dead after showing up uninvited in the midst of a tinder keg. I know, I know — he had to choose something he could sneak onto the subway, but there are so many good options on the market. Did he not google the Sig Sauer Copperhead? At just 14.5 inches in length, it would be a no-brainer to carry into virtually any location completely undetected.

Pffht. What a loser.

Do mass shooters today not know how to pick the right venue?

Nightclubs, concerts, schools — to get a high body count, you need to start with a lot of live bodies. You also need someplace where people are dancing, learning, and celebrating — you know, simply enjoying life as if the threat of a violent death isn’t lurking right around every corner in this great nation.

A subway car? The mall? No one’s got their guard down there. At the mall, you have to be ready to fight for the last item on the clearance rack — everyone’s ready to rock and roll at the drop of a dime. In a subway car, everyone expects to encounter a dangerous lunatic.

Run away, duck and cover — these impulses come naturally to people in the venues our latest mass shooters have chosen. They forget the proud heritage that dates all the way back to 1966 at the University of Texas, the location correctly chosen by Charles Whitman, who — it should be pointed out— killed fifteen people in just 96 minutes, earning the distinction of deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in US history, a record that stood for an amazing eighteen years. It’s a performance today’s mass shooters can only dream of.

Are our mass shooters simply not dedicated enough?

Stephen Paddock prepared for his rampage over the course of months and months. It takes a certain amount of commitment (although really not as much as you might think) to execute (ha — no pun intended) a really solid mass shooting. You have to build up a solid supply of weapons, buy some ammo (I hear Arizona is pretty liberal in how much they’ll let you purchase at once), pick a target, and then keep firing until all the clips are empty or the police are closing in. Everyone knows: you don’t shoot a couple of dozen times and then run away. You buy a bunch of high-capacity magazines, tape them together like we’re shown in violent movie after violent movie, and when you get to the end of the first magazine, you release it and flip it around and seat the magazine and keep going. When both sides are empty, you unclip it and let is slide cinematically to the ground as you remove one of the dozen or so other magazines you duct-taped to your body and then you keep going and going and going. That’s what a real American does.

Duh.

Look, America, we’re better than this. We expect better than this. Our mass shooters play a modest, but very important, role in maintaining our place in the world. We simply can’t expect to remain the global leader in gun deaths per capita if we don’t start holding our mass shooters to a higher standard, the American standard.