Thread: Four mass killings in four days leave the latest mark on U.S. violence toll

Four mass killings in four days leave the latest mark on U.S. violence toll

Yamiche Alcindor and Meghan Hoyer, USA TODAY10:40 p.m. EDT October 30, 2013

For the first time in at least seven years, four mass murders took place in four days.


(Photo: Anthony Lanzilote AP)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Killings are the worst consecutive spate in at least seven years

• Mass killings in four states in four days
• This year so far, 121 people have died in 26 mass killings

Nineteen people died in four mass killings over four days, the latest in a spate of tragedies showcasing shockingly familiar patterns of violence.

It's the first time in at least seven years that four mass murders happened within four days, according to a USA TODAY database that began collecting information in 2006.

Killers in three incidents went after those closest to them, the most common form of violence, while one man killed his neighbors. The nature and number of these deaths worry some but experts say the recent killings, while highly unusual, illustrate the random nature of mass murders.

"It makes me very angry and very sad," said Hollie Ayers, whose ex-husband shot her four times and killed their two-year old son Michael, before committing suicide in March. "In a developed country, this is probably one of the scariest things that you can hear and read about."

Wednesday, Ayers and several others including Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Chris Murphy urged Congress to pass stronger gun laws and require background checks on private and online sales of firearms. She believes the changes will prevent killings like the succession of violence that recently gripped four states.

Mingdong Chen, 25, a Chinese immigrant, is charged with stabbing his cousin's wife and her four children to death on Saturday in New York.

That same day in Arizona, Michael Dante Guzzo used his pump-action shotgun on his next-door neighbors--a family of four, police said.

Charles Everett Brownlow Jr. was arrested in Texas after allegedly killing his mother, aunt and three others on Monday. The next day, Bryan Sweatt allegedly shot his ex-girlfriend and four others in South Carolina.

"Four mass killings within four days is unusual," said Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who wrote a book on mass murders between 1900 and 1999. "It certainly does exceed the norm of what we see within a given month or week. But, it's too early to say whether the total number of cases is higher than what we would see on average."

About 30 mass killings happen each year, Duwe said.

This year, 121 people have died in 26 mass killings, according to USA TODAY's database. Last year, 133 people died in 22 mass killings.

The incidents happen about every 13 days, statistics show. This year, on April 28, July 26 and April 18th two mass killings happened on the same day. In February 2008, four mass killings happened in five days.

These numbers are part of the reason Jack Levin, a sociology and criminology professor at Boston's Northeastern University, isn't surprised that four mass killings happened in such a short time.

"Murders don't distribute themselves evenly over a 12-month period," Levin said. "Just because we see four occurring in proximity to each other doesn't mean we are suffering through an epidemic of mass murders but that's what people will think."

That type of thinking disturbs Kim Gandy, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

"The idea that it is not statistically significant to have 19 people die in a couple of days really tells you the enormity of this problem," she said.

Though statistics might not show such killings as abnormal, Gandy explained that murders have long lasting effects that can ruin people's lives and reverberate through family generations.

The numbers support her stance.

Some 40 percent of mass killings involved one family member killing another, Levin said. Often, a father, husband or boyfriend has some sort of struggle either with losing a job, custody of a child or the love of a significant other and decides to murder. In other cases, a child might kill their parents and siblings.

"In many cases, the motive in a family annihilation is revenge," Levin said. "The killer believes his victims are responsible for his miseries in life and decides to get even through the barrel of a gun or through a stabbing."

He added that people rarely think of their family members as potential assailants because they know and trust the person.

For Christy Salters Martin, who was stabbed and shot by her estranged husband in 2010, the issue was domestic violence. A former professional boxer, Martin said she kept quiet about her abusive husband to protect her career.

Like Ayers, she was on Capitol Hill Wednesday asking lawmakers to make getting a gun tougher.

"For 20 years my husband had been telling me if I ever left him, he would kill me," she said. "People have to pay close attention to family members."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...-days/3317821/

Mingdong Chen, 25, a Chinese immigrant, i

Mingdong Chen is not an immigrant you stupid communists at USSA Today! Mingdong Chen is an illegal immigrant, an illegal alien, an invader and one of many that slaughter people on American soil due to the woeful under-enforcement of America's existing border and immigration laws!

W

Four days, four massacres, 21 dead -- and as always, few answers

• 6 dead in South Carolina family feud; 'horrific' scene, sheriff says
• Eight hours of terror in Terrell, Texas, killing rampage, 5 dead
• Neighbors saw early flashes of anger in man who shot Phoenix family
• Brooklyn slayings: Neighbors say victims' relative struggled in U.S.

By Matt Pearce
October 30, 2013, 2:02 p.m.


If you bundled the attacks all together into one brutal event, it would have been the worst massacre since Adam Lanzawalked into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last December.

Instead, America's latest criminal tragedy has been doled out in bloody increments, just as senselessly as any mass shooting, and with no less of an astonishing casualty total: 21 people dead, after four days of inexplicable violence in four states.

In Phoenix: a disturbed pharmacist and former financial blogger, who had argued with his neighbors over their barking dogs, took his shotgun next door and killed four members of the Moore family -- plus two of their dogs -- before killing himself Saturday morning.

In Brooklyn, N.Y.: a troubled Chinese immigrant, said to be jealous of his relatives' success in the United States, stands accused of slaughtering a cousin-in-law and her four small children with a butcher knife at their apartment on Saturday night.

In Terrell, Texas: a small-time criminal is accused of unleashing eight hours of terror on the town of Terrell on Monday night, killing five people in four locations -- his mother, his aunt, two acquaintances and a convenience-store worker -- before his arrest after a high-speed chase.

In Greenwood, S.C.: an unknown man, who called 911 to say he was planning on hurting himself, hung up and instead apparently killed three adults, two children, and then himself in what officials think may be a domestic-violence-related incident. Greenwood County Sheriff Tony Davis told reporters it might be the worst crime scene he'd seen in 40 years of police work.

There has been no suggestion that any of these attacks are related; nor is there much reason to think they would be.

Instead, they're events bound together by a mutual senselessness, and when viewed from a step back, the past four days' killings reflect a more basic reality.

Events like these -- in each a handful of people were homicide victims, unlike the steep toll of Newtown, or of Aurora, Colo. -- are a relatively common if largely unacknowledged staple of American crime.

Every year, according to FBI data, at least 12,000 Americans are killed in homicides all over the country, a number that has now long been dropping for reasons that criminologists don't really agree on.

Cities once ravaged by drugs and gang violence in the '80s and '90s have now gotten so safe that experts argue you're more likely to get hurt if you live in the country, where car crashes help make injury-related deaths more common than in urban areas.

And in a reflection of the times, the national debate over public safety has quietly shifted.

The old concerns over drug dealers and gang violence have slowly been edged out by concerns over mass shootings, the worst of which spurred Congress this year to try (and fail) to pass a federal gun-control bill with the support of victims' families.

Just watching the news, it's certainly felt as if massacres are happening more often -- but are they really? It's tough to say; everyone seems to keep different figures.

Last week, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., the nation's top law-enforcement official, saidJustice Department figures show that mass shootings have tripled in recent years.

The Associated Press reported that from 2000 to 2008, 324 people were shot and 145 were killed in mass shootings; from 2009 to 2012, 404 people were shot and 207 people were killed, amounting to a fraction of the nation's annual homicide totals, but a notable increase nonetheless.

A Justice Department spokesperson couldn't immediately be reached for clarification on how the numbers were gathered -- which matters.
A Texas State University study released in March on the frequency of "active shooters" between 2000 and 2010 -- showing that active-shooter events nearly tripled at the end of the aughts -- shows just how tortuous the definition of a mass shooting can get:
An active shooter event involves one or more persons engaged in killing or attempting to kill multiple people in an area (or areas) occupied by multiple unrelated individuals. At least one of the victims must be unrelated to the shooter. The primary motive appears to be mass murder; that is the shooting is not a by-product of an attempt to commit another crime. While many gang-related shootings could fall within this category, gang-related shootings were excluded from this study because gang-related shootings are not considered to be active shooter events by the police.

Got it? Gang violence doesn't count; nor does domestic violence, even when a whole family is slaughtered. And of course, such a tally excludes extremely public mass attacks like the Boston Marathon bombings or intensely private rampages like Saturday's Brooklyn stabbings, since the suspects didn't use guns.

That rankles Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who in the last couple of years has dissented from specially tailored tallies (such as 'Mother Jones') that insist mass shootings and spree killings are on the rise.

“Sometimes the criteria are arbitrary, sometimes they’re hard to apply, and it tends to be a little subjective," Fox told The Times last week. “How do you classify what workplace shootings count and what don’t count?"

He says that his numbers (which count only shootings) show no big fluctuation: There are usually about 20 mass shootings a year that kill four or more people, many of which make no long-term splash with politicians or the media.

And for Fox, a casualty is a casualty.

"As far as people killed, does it matter if there’s two shooters, one shooter, it's in a public place, a semi-public place, a private place, or in a home?" Fox asked. "Does it matter where there was some military motive?”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-massacres-20131030,0,570401.story

Multiple Stabbings Over Weekend - Is It Time For Knife Control?

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Dave Jolly
Every time there is a shooting, especially one that involves multiple victims or children, the anti-gun liberals start screaming for more gun control. They want universal background checks, registration of every firearm in nation, registration of all ammo sales, banning of assault weapons and even mental background checks.

They claim it’s all about trying to stop the violence and nothing more. They completely ignore the statistics from here in the US and from other countries that show that the more gun control a location has, the more gun related violence they also have. Australia is a classic example where they banned most firearms and then watched as virtually every category of gun related crimes increased.

But where are the cries for knife control when mass stabbings or campus stabbings occur? Don’t the officials want to stop the violence?

Over the weekend, 25 year old Chen Mingdong took a kitchen knife and stabbed his cousin’s wife and her four kids that ranged from 1 year old to 9 years old. New York police were called to the apartment where they kept banging on the door before finally gaining entrance. Once inside the apartment, they found Mingdong covered in blood and the bodies of Qiao Zhen Li and her 5 year old son Kevin Zhou. As police searched the apartment, they found the bodies of the other three kids in a back bedroom.

During his interrogation, Mingdong admitted to stabbing and killing the five relatives and then told police that he did it because he was jealous of others who come to America and find success. He said he came here from China in 2004 and was greatly disillusioned with his life ever since then.

Another stabbing took place over the weekend at an apartment on the campus of Indiana University. Kaiyu Lao, 21 and Zesen Shen, 18, were arrested for stabbing another 20 year old student at the campus apartments early Sunday morning during a fight in the parking lot.

In my own area, there was a stabbing that took place less than a month ago. A pair of brothers got into a fight with one of them stabbing the other in the head and leg. Back in August, James Pearson, 51 used a box cutter to slash the chest and stomach of another man. Earlier this month, three more people in the Cincinnati area were stabbed. Richard Grove, 64, his wife Sharon, 58, and their son Matthew, 23, were all found to have stab wounds following a family dispute.

I’m sure that most major metropolitan areas in the US have stabbings occurring on a regular basis. Most are reported on local news and the rest of the nation never hears about them. Those that involve children or a campus get more media attention because of the age of the victims or the location.

If the liberals who call for more gun control were consistent in their quest to curb violence, then logic dictates that they call for the same measures to be taken with knives. If guns are the culprits, then so are the knives. If certain types of guns are banned, then perhaps certain types of knives should be banned also. If everyone who purchases a gun or ammo has to have a background check first, then so should everyone wanting to purchase a knife. If a grandfather gives his grandson a gun, the liberals want both of them to have a background check first, so if a grandfather gives his grandson a pocket or hunting knife, shouldn’t they also need to have background checks run on them?

It sounds ridiculous and it is, but if the whole issue is to reduce violence, then those hollering the loudest need to be consistent in their efforts and they aren’t. That’s because it’s not about gun control, it’s about people control. They want to control the people and it’s hard to do that when there are more privately owned guns than there are people in the country. They are afraid that a well-armed militia (the people) may just revolt against them as they did against the tyrannical rule of the British. If they keep going the way they are, that just might happen.

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/13058/m...ZVHMZlpRta9.99

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/13058/m...ZVHMZlpRta9.99

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and 500 of them die, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).


http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/1...y/?hpt=hp_bn13

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