July 6, 2021

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH

You can’t win a contest of grief in claiming whose loss of life is worse than another’s.

That’s why I hesitated to write this commentary. I don’t mean to be callous about the 28 dead now found (more than 100 missing) at the Champlain Towers South condo building. The loss of life and grief of surviving family and friends are staggering.

However, over the July Fourth weekend, CNN headlined an article, “At least 150 people fatally shot in more than 400 shootings over the Fourth of July weekend.” Other sources have the toll at a higher number. Indeed, NPR reported, based on figures from the GunViolenceArchive.Org

”More than 180 people were killed in shootings across the country over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive and reviewed by NPR.

By 11:30 p.m. on Monday, the Gun Violence Archive reported 189 people killed and 516 injured in shootings over the course of a 72-hour period starting Friday. In total, there were more than 540 shootings over the holiday weekend, the organization reported.

Those numbers may increase as the organization continues to collect statistics from the weekend.”

In Chicago alone the Sun-Times reports, “Chicago’s most violent weekend of 2021: 104 shot, 19 killed.”

So what do the gun stats from this weekend tell us? That the media has become numb to shootings as massacres? That gun violence is treated as a crime problem and not a product of a violent society? That politicians and many citizens have abandoned hope of gaining any sort of control over the gun lobby and the gun manufacturers, as guns continue to be baked into America’s history of hyper-masculine, colonial settler, domestic violence, slave patrols and grievance violence.

It is understandable and appropriate that the mainstream media has treated the Surfside catastrophe with compassion and discretion. However, the amount of television airtime devoted to every unfolding detail of the building collapse is more calculated to ratings than to consoling people for the loss of loved ones. Television, in particular, is a media outlet that performs at its peak when it is engaging the viewers and the victims in shared drama and grief.

“However according to The Washington Post, last year set new records for gun violence and death in recent years:

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.

The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color…

High-profile mass shootings…tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths, potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say….

“There are many communities across this country that are dealing with ever-present gun violence that is just part of their daily experience,” said Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise. “It doesn’t get the support, the spotlight, the national attention. People don’t understand that it’s continuous and it’s on the rise.”

There’s the rub. While no one can deny allowing a national period of mourning and deathwatch as more victims of the Surfside building collapse are found, television coverage of Surfside has come to dominate even many programs on political networks such as MSNBC.

Meanwhile, individual outbreaks of gun violence have become so frequent that even mass shootings receive less coverage than they used to.

However ghastly and evoking of sympathy and empathy the Surfside building collapse is, media coverage has made it clear that garden variety gun violence that kills 20,000 Americans a year (plus 20,000 suicides) is not going to get the same sort of compassionate and wall-to-wall coverage as we are seeing from Florida.

40,000 dead a year and the media stories remain remarkably fleeting, if they occur at all, about our particular cancer of gun violence and gun profiteers. America’s attraction to gun violence will not be resolved If a collapsed building, however evoking of solemn empathy, merits more coverage than the enormous toll of America’s shooting gallery. Where is our long-term commitment to exploring the lives of those who die by gunfire and how we as a society can save them?

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