For a war to be a war, does it need to be fought in proximity? Does it need to be fought only days apart from each other?
Sunday, even more souls were taken from this earth by the bullet – 14 total victims, including three dead along with the shooter, were reported – at Jacksonville Landing in Florida.
This is only the latest.
“After Sandy Hook, we said never again,” Vox reported.
“And then we let 1,824 mass shootings happen.”
That’s 1,824 just since Dec. 2012, when so many people said that they just wouldn’t let another mass shooting occur after 27 people were killed in Newtown, Conn.
Since 2013, we have only gone one week free of a mass shooting, Vox reported.
There’s been the 50 in Orlando, 59 in Las Vegas, the 17 in Parkland, the five in Annapolis.
And at least 1,908 others.
With at least 7,706 wounded, Lopez and Sukumar reported.
Nearly every state has seen a mass shooting in the past five-and-a-half years.
And that’s just mass shootings.
In 2016 alone, 39,000 people died from guns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mass shooting deaths comprised just 2 percent of all fatalities by bullet that year. You may remember from stats class that for something to even be statistically significant, it needs to be at least 5 percent.
That’s 250 percent of the percentage the mass shootings comprise.
Then there is this year, when 230 people have been murdered and 985 injured in 235 just mass shootings, assuming none happened between the updating of Vox’s piece and Jacksonville, where the shooter was reportedly upset about losing a game. (He also was a champion last year and one of the people he murdered, Elijah Clayton, was the same just the year before that.)
Since 1968, when these figures were first put together, until Aug. 2015, there were 1.517 million deaths by gun compared to 1.397 by war, PolitiFact reported, using data from the Congressional Research Service and icasualties.org, which has updated deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan.
By “war,” that means all American wars: the revolutionary war, the Mexican war, the Civil War (Union and Confederate, estimate), the Spanish-American war, World War I, World War II, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war.
And that includes conflicts not even classified as war, including in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Haiti.
The war deaths are inexcusable.
So terrible, in fact, that how can you say that the deaths by gun do not make for another war, with there being 9 percent more?
And as mentioned, the atrocities have only continued the past three years.
Since these deaths by gunfire have all been done on American soil, within the boundaries of America, how are we not in another civil war?
And has this civil war not lasted for 40 years now?
Forty years.
The United States of America is wandering through the desert.
It would make sense.
After all, murder is intolerable.
After all, gamers can get out of hand.
After all, schools are not a safe place for children.
After all, we are in a struggle of tolerance and irrationality.
And perhaps God wants us to figure this one out on our own, wanting His children to treat each other better, let alone not murder each other.
And perhaps until then, America won’t find Israel.
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Photo credit: Andrew Pons via Unsplash