What Should We Do About Violence?

If we take the number of fatal shootings which the Gun Violence Archive says occurred in the last 3 days, and then multiply that number by 365, we wind up with around 2,800,000 fatal gun violence assaults over the course of one year.

Now granted, this is hardly a scientific method to determine how many men, women and children will die from this particular type of behavior which is usually referred to as an ‘epidemic’ in American society but would be more accurately referred to as an ‘endemic’ aspect of everyday life.

On the other hand, since the CDC has basically given up on any attempt to quantify gun violence even though the agency now refers to the issue as a public health ‘threat,’ we have no choice but to rely on the data collected and published by the Gun Violence Archive which is compiled from media reports.

And since the usual approach to how the media deals with gun violence comes under the rubric of ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ the data produced by the Gun Violence Archive is as good as we’re going to get.

There’s a group up at Hamline University in Minnesota calling themselves the Violence Prevention Project which made a name for itself several years ago when they published a study based on interviews with mass shooters, a study which basically found that such individuals often demonstrated aberrant…