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The repetition of horror numbs the mind: Only 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a man driven by racism gunning down 10 people at a supermarket. The next day another angry man walked into a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, Calif., and killed one person and wounded five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas — a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the killing of at least 19 elementary school children in second, third and fourth grades.

“I guess it’s something in society we know will happen again, over and over,” said Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

The misery mounts, and yet nothing changes, leaving Americans with little more to do than keep lists, mental spreadsheets of death that treat events like Uvalde as just another morbid tally with superlatives like “second-deadliest shooting in an elementary school.”

Each event evokes some atrocity from the past, the exact details of each shooting growing more indistinct by the year: The latest death toll of 21 at Robb Elementary School in Texas surpasses the shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, when 17 people were killed. It falls short of the deadliest school shooting — when 26 people were killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

These are the mathematics of American gun massacres.

All three school shootings — Newtown, Parkland and now Uvalde — have eclipsed Columbine in 1999, when such events still had the power to shock the nation.

The reasons for the violence are familiar and incontrovertible. The United States has many more guns than citizens, about 400 million firearms, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, and 331 million people.

For more than a decade now, semiautomatic handguns, purchased for personal protection, outsell rifles, which have been typically used in hunting.

And the coronavirus pandemic stirred an even greater gun-buying craze. Annual domestic gun production increased from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020, according to a report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A vast majority of those firearms stayed in the United States.

The toll of the violence, especially on children, has only grown. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.

Last year, more than 1,500 children and teenagers younger than 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings, compared with about 1,380 in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database tracking gun deaths.

Many details about the Uvalde shooting have yet to be made public, including the weapons used by the gunman — an 18-year-old man who died at the scene, the authorities said — and how he obtained them. But the emotional turmoil of the killings was sadly familiar.

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Biden said on Tuesday night after returning from a trip to Asia. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a young legislator when the children were killed in Sandy Hook, exhorted his fellow senators to action on Tuesday. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” he said on the Senate floor.

These were questions with typical answers: not much of anything on the federal level. Republicans, often appealing to the Second Amendment, have blocked efforts to add stiffer background checks for gun purchasers every time another major mass shooting jostles the nation’s conscience. Still, within hours of the shooting in Uvalde, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, moved to clear the way to force votes in the coming days on legislation that would strengthen background checks.

In the meantime states like Texas have forged ahead with some of the least-restrictive gun laws in the United States, priding itself as a state with responsible gun owners — more than a million — even with its recent history of mass shootings.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed a wide-ranging law in 2021 that ended the requirement for Texans to obtain a license to carry handguns, allowing virtually anyone over the age of 21 to carry one. The landmark law made the state one of the largest to adopt a “constitutional carry” law that basically eliminates most restrictions on the ability to carry handguns.

Mr. Abbott described it as “the strongest Second Amendment legislation in Texas history.”

Mass shootings have become so common in the United States that only a small fraction rise to attract widespread attention beyond the communities directly affected. On the same weekend as the Buffalo killings, more than a dozen people were wounded by gunfire in downtown Milwaukee, near the arena where an N.B.A. playoff game ended hours earlier, the authorities said.

Two weeks earlier, the owner and two employees of the Broadway Inn Express motel in Biloxi, Miss., were fatally shot, and another person was also shot dead during a carjacking.

Less than four weeks before that, a barrage of gunfire in Sacramento killed six people and wounded 12 in a shooting that the authorities said involved at least five gunmen.

On Monday, the F.B.I. released data showing a rapidly escalating pattern of public shootings in the United States.

The bureau identified 61 “active shooter” attacks in 2021 that killed 103 people and injured 130 others. That was the highest annual total since 2017, when 143 people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded, numbers inflated by the sniper attack on the Las Vegas Strip.

The 2021 total represented a 52 percent increase from the tally of such shootings in 2020, and a 97 percent increase from 2017, according to the F.B.I.’s Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021 report.

In Uvalde, Rey Chapa has a nephew who was at the school during the shooting but was not injured.

“This is just evil,” Mr. Chapa said in an interview, using an expletive. He was waiting to hear back from family and friends about the conditions of other children and scrolling through Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.”

Contributing reporting was Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson, Christine Hauser, Eduardo Medina, Sarah Mervosh, Alexandra E. Petri, Michael D. Shear, Glenn Thrush and Elizabeth Williamson.

Thomas Fuller is the San Francisco bureau chief. Before moving to California he reported from more than 40 countries for The Times and International Herald Tribune, mainly in Europe and Southeast Asia. @thomasfullerNYT • Facebook

The Stupefying Tally of American Gun Violence
May 25, 2022,
5:00 a.m. ET,
NYT,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/
us/american-gun-violence.html

From Stunned to Stunning

for Louisville

March 31, 2013

The New York Times

By ZACH SCHONBRUN

INDIANAPOLIS — After all the buildup, the history, with a matchup of decorated coaches and programs, the most poignant moment of Sunday’s Midwest Region final sprang from an injury perhaps unparalleled in its gruesomeness at an N.C.A.A. tournament.

The scene after Louisville’s Kevin Ware sustained an open fracture of his right leg late in the first half was surreal. Four Cardinals woozily held each other up at center court, several appearing on the brink of fainting, others crying and shaking. Coach Rick Pitino dabbed away tears. Players on the bench said a prayer.

While being treated on the floor, before a cart carried him off to a hospital, Ware called his teammates over, but they could not hear him. Pitino had to yell.

“Guys!” Pitino cried. “He wants to say something.”

Russ Smith, Peyton Siva, Chane Behanan, Wayne Blackshear and Gorgui Dieng gathered around Ware, who said through tears, “Just win it for me, y’all.”

His words soothed the souls of 13 players who turned their sorrow into fuel. Louisville, the region’s No. 1 seed, responded by dismantling the second-seeded Blue Devils, 85-63, in a commanding second-half performance at Lucas Oil Stadium to earn a second consecutive trip to the Final Four.

At halftime, Pitino told his team to win for Ware, who grew up in Atlanta, where the Final Four will be held. At the time of Ware’s injury, the Cardinals led, 21-20, but it was going to take a monumental resurgence of character not to let the scene they had witnessed derail their play.

They emerged from the locker room with eight minutes before the second half began — unusually early. They were ready to run, run, run again.

“We couldn’t lose this game for him,” Pitino said. “We just couldn’t.”

Louisville unleashed a torrent of layups and steals, blocks and dunks, a basketball bludgeoning. The Cardinals (33-5) shot 59.2 percent in the second half to hand Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski his second loss in 13 appearances in the Round of 8.

“We know how hard it is to beat Duke,” Pitino said. “If you let Duke shoot and you let Duke get in transition, you’re going to lose. We took those two things away.”

Pitino does know how hard it is to beat Duke. As the Kentucky coach in 1992, his team lost to the Blue Devils in overtime of the 1992 East Region final on Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beating shot, perhaps the most famous play in college basketball history.

The two coaches remained close friends — they even appeared in socks and underwear together in a popular commercial in 2009 for the video game Guitar Hero — but faced each other only one more time since then: in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in the Bahamas, on Nov. 24.

Duke (30-6) won that game, 76-71, handing Louisville its first loss, but the Cardinals were without their center, Dieng, who had a broken left wrist and whose absence left the team without an integral defensive presence inside. Dieng sprinkled in a little offensive game Sunday, scoring 14 points with 11 rebounds and 4 blocks.

Louisville’s pestering defense had a discernible effect on Duke’s Seth Curry, who struggled finding open shots in the first half, after his 29-point outburst carried the Blue Devils against Michigan State in the Round of 16.

“They just come at you the whole game,” Curry said. “They’re a great backcourt, and it was a tough test today.”

Curry, guarded by Siva and Luke Hancock, stirred to life in the second half, scoring Duke’s first 8 points. But the success was short-lived, and then again, the Cardinals were motivated.

At halftime, the Louisville coaching staff did not know what to expect. The mood was somber. Pitino’s message was short.

“Don’t lose this game for Kevin Ware,” Smith recalled.

Less than four minutes into the second half, Mason Plumlee dunked in a putback to tie the score, 42-42. Then Smith hit a layup, and Siva hit a jumper, and Behanan made a steal. Within minutes, Louisville was on a 17-2 run. The shift was reminiscent of the Cardinals’ second-half dismantling of Syracuse in the title game of the Big East tournament.

The rout was on.

“I thought we had a chance there, and then boom,” Krzyzewski said. “That’s what they do to teams.”

Siva scored 10 of his 16 points after halftime, and Smith finished with a game-high 23 to earn the region’s most outstanding player award. Remarkably, the Cardinals were only 2 of 13 from the 3-point line. They scored 42 of their points in the lane.

Pitino thanked his son, Richard, the Florida International coach, for suggesting to him at practice Saturday a different way to incorporate the pick-and-roll, knowing how good Plumlee and Ryan Kelly are at defending it.

“It worked to perfection,” Pitino said.

After the game, as ladders were assembled underneath the hoops, the Louisville players ran off the court. They told one another before the Big East tournament that they would not cut down nets until after the national championship game.

“We just want the big one,” Behanan said.

At some point before the final buzzer, Ware’s No. 5 jersey made its way back to the Louisville bench. Behanan, Ware’s closest friend on the team, held it aloft and then pulled it on. The crowd chanted Kevin’s name. The tears welled up again.

From Stunned to Stunning for Louisville,
NYT,
31.3.2013,
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/
sports/ncaabasketball/louisville-defeats-duke-
but-kevin-ware-breaks-leg-in-first-half.html

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