Another mass shooting...

[GMDino]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/billgoodykoontz/2015/10/01/shooting-coverage-routine-column/73178584/

Quote:Another day, another mass shooting.

That’s become literally true; according to the Washington Post, the tragedy today in Roseburg, Ore., brings the total of mass shootings, in which four or more people are killed or injured, to 294.

Thursday was the 274th day of the year.

Whenever something like this happened, I used to drop what I was doing and monitor media coverage, looking for some kind of meaning that would help make sense of it. In retrospect that probably wasn’t the best place to look. And not just because cable news goes into what-it-all-means mode, which quickly gives way to grandstanding and agenda pushing.

No, ultimately it was a dead end because there is no meaning to this. You can’t be inside the head of every shooter. What’s more, you can’t rationally explain why we continue to allow this to happen. We can look to social media, which has supplanted traditional news coverage as the go-to way to experience big events, for clues. But like everything else about the coverage of these events, it’s become predictable, too.

First there is the report of what happened. Details are added as the story develops, some accurate, some not. Things sort out and then the fights begin. Gun-control opponents warn that it’s not a good time to debate laws, it’s too soon to talk about the politics of it all; let’s let the families mourn. That actually worked for a while, but soon gun-control advocates began saying that there is never a good time, so we might as well jump in now.

This goes back and forth for a while, President Obama is mentioned — praised or vilified, again predictably depending on your political leanings — and … we move on.

We move on. How strange is that? At one time we might have said this was a coping mechanism. But that’s no longer true.

Now it’s just routine.

That sounds cold, heartless. But it’s true. Can you name a victim in any of the more-recent tragedies? Or even where they took place? We aren’t numb to it, not exactly. We’re numb to tragedies in the Middle East, or Africa. Here, at least, we still bother to become outraged enough to tweet a thought or two before going back to whatever else is trending.

I’m not a social scientist, but I am an observer of human behavior, and I would suggest that any possible scenario in which something like the shooting death of at least 10 people at a community college becomes routine means something is seriously wrong.

How do we fix it? Stop making it so easy for disturbed people to get access to guns is a start. But it’s hardly the only solution. Something has to give. We can’t give up on outrage and heartbreak. Not as media, and not as a society. A story like today’s still has to shock us. It still has to move us.

And it has to make us do something to stop this insanity. Events become newsworthy in part because they’re rare. They don’t happen every day.

Mass shootings do. And that’s a story that has to change.