At least 13 people were shot and killed Monday by a gunman who opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington D.C..
That sentence should be enough to make a person shudder. For many it still is, but perhaps, the statement does not have quite the impact it should.
Two members of our editorial board remember writing about the Boston Marathon bombings in April. We wrote about how these events impact our generation by causing desensitization to such brutal and senseless violence. We hoped it would be the only editorial dealing with an act like that that we would have to write.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
We relived the Boston bombings, the horror we felt in December 2012 when we learned that dozens of elementary school students, teachers and others had been killed in Newtown, Conn. at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We relived the August prior when 12 movie-goers in Aurora, Colo. were shot to death at the midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises."
These are just within the last 13 months.
Within the past 20 years there have been numerous other instances of violence that shocked the nation and the world. These topics of conversation have almost become commonplace.
Rather than attempting to reform policy on protecting those with mental health issues that could endanger themselves and/or others, or reassessing who should have the right to bear arms, people have become obsessed with being on the defensive. Americans have accepted these instances as part of our society and culture.
There are classes now that teach office workers and teachers to defend themselves against armed intruders so that people who are very afraid of such situations can feel prepared to confront them. In generations past the idea of a mass shooting in and of itself was unheard of, let alone a class to prepare for such an attack.
Sunday evening the Prindle Institute for Ethics hosted Suzanne McCarroll, a broadcast journalist from Denver who has covered the tragedies at the Aurora movie theater and Columbine High School among many others. She described it as the "bummer beat" in journalism. When things go wrong she goes to cover them.
Bad things will always happen, but why should McCarroll have to continue covering these "bummer" issues? Why have these instances become so frequent that there are plans for media coverage?
After the shootings at Sandy Hook, legislators sought stricter arms controls policies that they felt confident that they would have an easy sell in Congress. The nation shuddered in the wake of that tragedy, but parents of children who died at the hand of a gunman that day in December have seen no change in policy.
After bombings rocked Boston, shootings panicked Santa Monica over the summer and a third instance of violence in the last nine months shook the Navy Yard on Monday, we wonder how many more instances it will take to get the message across.