Author: tkspitzer

The headline:

Teen fatally shoots a female student and himself at Antioch High School in Nashville, police say

You can visit the AP story for the details. As the story mentions, there seems to be a lot of this going on in the Nashville area.

According to this article on Everytown,

On September 21, 2023, President Biden established the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Gun violence prevention groups, advocates, legislators, and survivors of gun violence had long requested that the White House create an office dedicated to preventing gun violence.

The article goes on to discuss the work the WHOGV (really, now?) had done in its first year. Well, it won’t be doing any more. With the departure of the Biden/Harris executive team, the Office appears to be closed, yielding a 404 error to those who try to visit its web site. If you want to see what their page looked like, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has a number of iterations including this one from December.

Brady United reports

“While gun violence in the U.S. surged under President Trump’s first term, the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention led a cross-agency public health approach to preventing gun violence,” the organization wrote. “This contributed to a significant drop in the proliferation of unserialized and untraceable ghost guns, the largest-ever decrease in the homicide rate, and historic funding for Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs.” OK, what’s Plan B?

And in the meantime, the folks over at Guns.com seem pretty happy.

A student at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI shot and killed a teacher, another student, and herself, and injured a number of others on December 16, 2024. According to CNN, this was the 83rd school shooting recorded in 2024, surpassing 2023 for the most school shootings in a single year since CNN began tracking such incidents in 2008.

Here we go again, living in a civilized society, with up to the minute media coverage of another massacre of innocent children. You all know the details but if you need a refresher, CNN has the story (as do most other news outlets).

Once again, the world is watching. Does the U.S. have the will to do anything about this. Doubtful. As a big fan of the Golden State Warriors, I appreciated Steve Kerr’s comments.

Reflecting on this event two and a half years later…. I bought this domain something like ten years ago. I thought it might have a short shelf life. I turned out to be horribly wrong.

Sure, somebody’s got to be really screwed up to commit such an act like the Uvalde, but murdering children in your own community is not a normal symptom of being screwed up. There’s something seriously wrong with us if we can normalize the situation of a person turning eighteen (18) and not only thinking that they want to perpetrate such an act, but being afforded the means to do it. Oh, I’ll just buy a couple semi-automatic weapons today and go murder kids. I could do that, but I haven’t. Maybe you want to consider putting up some barriers to someone’s doing that. Given the total surveillance we live under where if I tell my wife the litter box is not working for our cat, my phone immediately feeds me an ad for a high tech litter box, you cannot tell me that its impossible to predict that somebody buying an AR-15 might have a plan. Well, that and the fact that the only thing an AR-15 is good for is killing humans in high volume. You wouldn’t want to hunt with the damn thing, it would ruin your trophy buck. OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Earlier we reported that firearms were the second leading cause of death among U.S. children.

On April 24, 2022, USA Today reported on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studying finding that firearms became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States in 2020. The finding comes after a record 45,222 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2020 in the U.S., according to a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Most of the deaths were from firearm homicide.

Per USA Today, for more than 60 years, motor vehicle accidents had been the leading cause of deaths of young people, but since 2001, the number of those deaths has dramatically decreased. There were about 3,900 deaths in 2020. Meanwhile, firearm-related deaths have been on the rise since 2013; there was a 29.5% increase from 2019 to 2020.

This 2019 article from “The Conversation” by University of Michigan academics identifies some of the key trends in child and adolescent deaths in the U.S. Most of them have been highly preventable.

This did not start out to be a Minneapolis focused site, but here we are. Teenagers shooting high school kids in Richfield.

• This post from NPR