Tragedies such as what occurred in Orlando, Fla., over the weekend have a sobering impact on all of us.
We’re all on edge. The nation has been shaken.
Then something happens closer to home — a lot closer to home, in fact — and your hair stands straight up in a manner it otherwise might not had the earlier tragedy not occurred.
This morning I was driving home from an assignment in Pampa, Texas. My phone rang; I answered it using the Bluetooth device in my truck. It’s my wife.
“Where are you?” she asked. I tell her I’m on Amarillo Boulevard about to turn south onto Loop 335.
“Don’t go near Interstate 27 and Georgia Street,” she instructed me. “The police have it blocked off. There’s a shooter.”
Holy s***!
It turns out that someone was holding someone else hostage inside the Walmart store at that intersection. Police had cordoned off the area. They were negotiating with the gunman.
I got home and watched the news. Not much time after returning home came word that law enforcement officers had shot the gunman to death. The hostage is OK.
The crisis is over. Now comes the investigation into what happened and why.
Then it occurred to me. This is what acts of terror do to people. The gunman in Orlando might have committed that horrific act for any number of reasons.
The bottom line is this: He terrorized that community and in the process put the rest of this very large and powerful nation on edge.
Suffering the symptoms of fear as a result of a terrorist act is no fun at all.
Quite obviously, I’m glad the crisis is over and that the Amarillo Police Department, the Randall County Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Department of Public Safety, which I know to be run by dedicated professionals, did their jobs.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for keeping us safe.
We all can breathe again.
Interesting that you noted the “sobering impact” mass-shootings have on us, because I did a back-of-the-envelope analysis after the Sandyhook atrocity which I labeled “sober.xls”.
Source data came from a Mother Jones histogram which listed “Annual mass shooting casualties by year for 1982-2012 (includes Aurora and Sandyhook).
Reason.com has since cited this graphic and suggested that it is likely to be gleaned from press accounts and may be incomplete. They say the FBI has for some time gathered such data on a consistent basis (along with “common” homicides of all types).
There was also a total-by-state, which may somewhat explain your edginess:
Texas and Florida had the highest figures – 52 and 126 respectively.
Anyway, I arrayed the yearly figures along with US Population for each year and extracted an annual figure for each year:
Deaths by Mass Shooting/100-million/year.
The average of these figures (1982-2012)
= 6.0 deaths/100-million/year.
I found a shorter series of data for death by lightening strike (1900-2003). That average worked out to
19.9 deaths/100-million/year.
(The 31-year Texas average was (52 deaths)/(31 years) = 1.7 per year. Supposing “only” 20-million on average in Texas the 31-yr rate was 8.4 deaths/100-million/year.)
The usual way this would expressed in a newspaper account (or in the Harper’s index) would be that over 31 years Americans were three times more likely to die by lightening strike than by mass shooting.
(Or for Texans, about twice more likely)
Some folks take no comfort from objective analysis. I hope you do – you seem to be a committed, engaged journalist in your retirement, and I’d much rather you weren’t on edge. See here for the Mother Jones histogram:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mass-shootings-investigation
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/what-happened-newtown-connecticut-elementary-school-shooting
I dare to suggest that you could do some digging into the FBI figures with your professional journalist’s eye (and resources and contacts) and flesh out my very-rough look at the matter?