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The older generation of shooters seem critical of the younger onesĪlthough the American Medical Association has described gun violence as an epidemic, since 1996 the National Rifle Association, America’s most powerful gun-rights organisation, has striven hard to obliterate this assessment. I sent letters to each of them asking them that same question: what could have stopped you doing what you did? In 2012, researchers at Stanford University began compiling a database listing every mass shooting in America since 1966, creating a single repository for as many reports of mass-shooting events as they could collect online.Ĭross-checking, where possible, with individual prison rosters, I found that there were around 50 mass shooters still languishing in prisons across the US. Would it have been some kind of counselling? Would it have been legislation that could have stopped you getting hold of the weapon that caused so much destruction? And what was it that drove you over the edge? But if we could, we might ask them this: what would have stopped you doing what you did? You tell us. But it occurred to me that the one person we never speak to about mass shootings is the mass shooter himself (and it is, almost always, a him) – perhaps because they too often kill themselves or are dispatched by police. It becomes factionalised, politicised and nothing changes. I wanted to know what this would-be mass murderer had to say about one of the worst school shootings in US history.Īmerica has the same conversation after each mass shooting, I told him – the inevitable debate about gun control versus mental-health care (rarely both at the same time). 270-calibre bolt-action rifle and three boxes of cartridges to his high school, stood in the tall grass in a nearby field and fired into a classroom.Ĭhad Escobedo hadn’t killed anyone that day, and because he was sentenced as a juvenile he had now done his time – a little under six years – and was happily living and working in the Pacific Northwest. I’d already been working on this story about mass shootings for a month before Parkland and while my wife was emailing our little girl’s headteacher about gun safety, I was in the other room Facebook messaging with a man, now in his twenties, who, eleven years earlier, had taken his stepfather’s Winchester. “It’s heartbreaking and we feel powerless.” She asked about so-called active-shooter drills on campus and what was being done to protect the school. “We agonise about sending our only child into a setting where she can be the victim of gun violence,” she wrote. The morning after Parkland happened, my wife sat in the office at our house in Austin, Texas, emailing the headteacher at our six-year-old’s school, to ask how she planned to keep the students safe.
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Eighteen-year-old Emma Gonzalez, with her head shaved and wrist full of friendship bangles, and serious, clean-cut David Hogg, also 18, have unwittingly become the movement’s most recognisable leaders, tirelessly campaigning to address the crisis of gun violence in America. Perhaps it was the reaction of the students who survived that made it exceptional, but the wave of gun-control activism they have spearheaded since has been palpable. Unfathomably, the Las Vegas shooting seemed to drop off the news agenda as quickly as it had arrived.īut something was different with Parkland. Nothing changed, either, after the worst mass shooting in US history when, last October, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock fired into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers in Las Vegas from his hotel window, killing 58 and injuring more than 800.