The numbers jump off the page: Nine dead on an Oregon college campus, 12 in a theater in Aurora. Thirteen soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas; 32 people at Virginia Tech; 13 at a community center in Binghamton, New York. Twenty-six dead – 20 of them young children – at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
Mass killings like the one Thursday at the Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, scraped nerves raw, commanded headlines and prompted an anguished President Barack Obama to take to the airwaves – again – to condemn gun violence.
Here’s another number: 8,124. That’s the total of homicides by gun in 2014, according to the FBI’s Crime in the United States report. That works out to an average of 156 a week, more than 22 people shot to death every day across the country.
Dr. Helen Farrell, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is on staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said people do have more interest in – and there is certainly more intense media coverage of – mass killings because they are relatively uncommon.
“That’s unfortunate because those single homicides are far more prevalent and cause just as much pain and suffering to the people involved,” she said.
In just the 24 hours surrounding Thursday’s Oregon killings, there were at least a dozen shooting deaths. Among them were:
Five-month-old Aavielle Wakefield died Thursday when more than a dozen shots were fired into a car. An angry Police Chief Calvin Williams broke down crying while briefing the media on the shooting. It was the third time in a month that Williams’ department has investigated the shooting death of a child.
A man in the northern Florida community of Inglis shot two people to death, including his estranged wife, and critically injured a third before killing himself.
Three shootings Wednesday night and Thursday morning left two men dead and another injured, The Baltimore Sun reported. Just before 10 p.m., police found Deyquawn Charvez Cooper, 21, with a single gunshot wound to his upper body. They announced the next day that he had died and a family member was in custody. A 32-year-old found with gunshots in his upper body also died from his injuries.
Two people died in Capitol Heights, a Washington suburb, after a triple shooting Wednesday night. Ernest Gene Lott, 37, and Garland Johnson, 43, both of Washington, D.C., died about a block away from where a security guard at an apartment complex in Capitol Heights was shot and killed in July.
Police responded to an upscale high-rise in Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta about 5 a.m. Thursday and found security guard Emmanuel Nwankwo, 23, shot several times. Another guard, Dexter Harper, was taken into custody and charged with murder.
Police in Kent, Washington, say a confrontation led to the shooting death of a 23-year-old man found in his car in a Target shopping center parking lot. Witnesses reported that the driver of another vehicle fired shots just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, sending shoppers scrambling to stay inside the store.
