Women Slaughtered In Shootings; Media Shrugs
Philadelphia Inquirer opinion writer Will Bunch has had enough of our collective complacency, and he is not alone. In his column, yesterday, he mourned that there were not one, but THREE mass shootings this week, and not one of them registered on the Richter scale of our consciousness beyond the immediate local community. In fact, sometimes, not even in one's local community, as he found out.
When I called a local anti-gun-violence advocate — Shira Goodman of CeaseFirePA — to talk about the recent shootings, she mentioned one right here in Pennsylvania that I literally knew nothing about. It turns out that also last week, a (stop me if you’ve heard this before) 21-year-old white male pulled out a gun in a hotel bar in State College, killing two of the three people that he hit, before he fled and broke into the home of an 83-year-old man, a stranger, whom he also shot to death before turning the weapon on himself.
Right in his own backyard, and he hadn't heard about it. This, in the same week that a 21-year-old white man gunned down five random women in a Sun Trust Bank in Sebring, Florida. Two of the five had seven children each, who have now have been robbed of the woman raising them.