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Beto O’Rourke and Plymouth, England Have the Right Response to Mass Shootings
We need to treat the trauma of these events seriously
When someone hauls out a gun and starts shooting, it doesn’t just injure the people who get hit, it traumatizes the entire community. Add in the reach of modern media and the trauma spreads far and wide. How should we react?
Is mass murder a laughing matter? No, swears Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke. Do we try to pretend it didn’t happen and quickly move on? No, says the city of Plymouth in England.
This isn’t supposed to happen here
On August 12, 2021 in Plymouth, England a 22-year-old man shot his mom in her house. He then went outside and shot and killed a 3-year-old girl and her dad out walking their dog. Heading down the street he shot and wounded a woman and her adult son. Continuing on to a park he shot and killed another man and then a woman before finally turning the gun fatally on himself.
Stories like this are all too common in the United States but very rare in Great Britain which has much tighter gun control laws. The BBC labeled it “the worst such event in Britain since 2010.”
