What time is tonight’s mass shooting scheduled?
What popped up on Twitter first thing this morning came from Susie Madrak in Philadelphia:
My neurons fire funny. The first thing that came to mind was, “What time is tonight’s mass shooting scheduled?” The line, as I recall, derives from the last chapter of “Going to Extremes” by Joe McGinniss (1980). Only then it was a campfire joke about encountering a grizzly bear in the northern Brooks Range. They were supposedly rare in the area, the hikers’ guide had assured, yet the group had already had one dangerous close encounter with a sow grizzly and two cubs. They spotted another in the distance moments later.
One would think mass shootings would be as rare in the Lower 48, and you’d be equally as wrong. Going to extremes, indeed.
By the time I Googled, the Philadelphia Inquirer was reporting 14 shot and three dead:
Three people were killed and 11 others wounded in a mass shooting late Saturday night on South Street amid chaos that erupted on legendary blocks that have long been among the region’s most popular gathering places.
“Once it started I didn’t think it was going to stop,” said Joe Smith, 23, who was standing outside the Theater of the Living Arts on South between Third and Fourth Streets, when the shots rang out around 11:30 p.m.
“It was chaos,” said Eric Walsh was closing up the outdoor seating area of O’Neals, a bar near Third and South. He saw a young woman collapse to the ground on the corner.
“People were coming off the street with blood splatters on white sneakers and skinned knees and skinned elbows,” said a visibly shaken Walsh. “We literally just were balling up napkins and wetting them and handing them to people.”
Shooting erupted in a popular dining and shopping area about 11:30 p.m. Details are sketchy, as they are this early in an investigation:
Police have yet to identify the shooters, but confirm there was more than one person shooting into the crowd. Their motive is not known.
An officer fired at one of the shooters, who was still firing a gun into the crowd, said Pace. The shooter dropped the weapon, which Pace said had an extended magazine.
All the better to shoot as many people as swiftly as possible. Stopping to change magazines during a spree shooting is so tedious.
Researchers found in an earlier spate of shootings the marks of social contagion (NPR):
In other words, school shootings and other shootings with four or more deaths spread like a contagion — each shooting tends to spark more shootings.
“So one happens and you see another few happen right after that,” says Jillian Peterson, a criminologist at Hamline University in Minnesota and founder of the nonpartisan think tank, The Violence Project. She wasn’t involved in the Arizona State research but has found similar patterns in her own research.
Towers and her colleagues also found that what set apart shootings that were contagious was the amount of media coverage they received. “In the incidences where there were four or more people killed, and even school shootings, those tended to get national and even international media attention,” says Towers.
She also found that there is a window when a shooting is most likely to lead to more incidents — about two weeks. Towers and her team published their results in 2015.
Couldn’t we just have laughing epidemics or dancing plagues instead?
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