It's perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises
in Colorado last Friday is the latest in an epidemic of such gun
violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at
least 56 mass murders*
carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings
unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. We've mapped them
below, including details on the shooters' identities, the types of
weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed.
Of the 132 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters
were obtained legally. The arsenal included dozens of assault weapons
and high-powered handguns. (See charts below.) Just as Jeffrey Weise
used a .40-caliber Glock to massacre students in Red Lake, Minn., in
2005, so too did James Holmes when blasting away at his victims in a
darkened movie theater.
Half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (11 and 17,
respectively); the other 28 cases took place in locations including
shopping malls, restaurants, government buildings, and military bases.
Only one of the killers was a woman. (See Goleta, Calif., in 2006.)
Explore the map for further details—we do not consider the map to be
all-inclusive, but based on the criteria we used
to identify mass murders, we believe that we've produced one of the
most comprehensive rundowns available on this particular type of
traumatic violence. (Mass murders represent only a sliver of America's
overall gun violence.) For a timeline listing all the cases on the map,
including photos of the killers, jump to page 2.
Read on...
Last Spring, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was a pretty credible
candidate for the vice presidency. Then he tripped over a trans-vaginal
ultrasound bill that enraged women throughout the commonwealth and
turned—almost overnight—into a great big political cautionary tale. As Alexander Burns explained in Politico,
McDonnell’s early support of a law that would have mandated an invasive
ultrasound procedure for women seeking abortions “turned McDonnell’s
national political fortunes upside down.” (He later switched positions,
signing a modified version of that law that did away with the now
politically-toxic internal probe.) McDonnell not only became a walking
human punch line for a few days, but he also may have finally managed to
turn the commonwealth into a blue state: President Obama appears to
have opened up a 20-point lead over Mitt Romney among women voters, who, presumably, didn’t want the state probing them for no coherent medical reason.