'45th shooting at a school so far this year'
Side note in the HuffPo link.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reports-shooting-umpqua-community-college-oregon_560d7658e4b0af3706dfdcd1
= new reply since forum marked as read
"The story is actually better than we all anticipated it would be," says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. "Violence is down a little bit. Property crime is down a lot… and all of this suggests that crime in America is continuing to move in the right direction.”
Earlier this month, I joined a number of fact-checkers in pointing out that a breathless New York Times story, "Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities," was misleading. The 30 cities cited by the Times weren't randomly selected; rather, they appeared to suggest their own selection because they were cities that had experienced a recent rise in killings.
That the Times got that story wrong mattered because it appeared right in the middle of a debate over the existence of a so-called “Ferguson Effect”—the (false) idea that the Black Lives Matter movement has somehow been emboldening criminals. But a Vera Institute of Justice senior research fellow looked at the most recent homicide data from 16 of the 20 most populous U.S. cities, and found that just three showed a statistically significant increase. And homicide rates often fluctuate; in recent years, Chicago's has moved both up and down, pointing to no real trend at all.
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http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/09/violent-crime-rates-still-declining/408103/
AIIIEEE!!! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!! Gun violence EPIDEMIC!! We must do something about the GUNZ!!!
The reality is: despite the sensationalist MSM playing up these rare acts of mass violence, American cities and streets haven't been this safe in a long time.
Looking better each and every year.
We need to look at the bigger picture.
45 "active shooter" incidents is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall rate of violent crime.
So long as the overall aggregate violent crime rate continues to tack downwards, we are making progress and moving in the right direction.
Just like all this sensationalist MSM garbage making it sound like cop killings are becoming much more frequent. If you look at the actual numbers, fewer cops have been killed under Obama's watch than under Dubya's.
Yet according to the media, we should all keep blaming BLM for making the streets "dangerous for cops."
You really believe this is an appropriate response following yet another a mass shooting?
clearly, you do 
Even one of these horrific events should be a call to action to prevent another .... but, I do realize robbery is down.
Granted, probably not the best time.
But believe it or not, I'd like nothing more than for us to find a way to reduce these way-too-frequent school shootings.
What I fear though, is that it will turn out that this guy either bought his guns legally because he wasn't disqualified, meaning even universal background checks wouldn't have stopped him, or he ended up getting someone else to buy them for him, which completely bypasses the process.
I guess I'm just too cynical any more to think that tougher gun control laws are ever going to solve this problem.
