By Sally Schulze
Expect several more massing shootings this year, Chicago professor says
Thousands traveled to Capitol Hill, including many from Chicago, even celebrities like Common. They were all demanding an end to gun violence.
CHICAGO - Thousands traveled to Capitol Hill, including many from Chicago, even celebrities like Common. They were all demanding an end to gun violence.
They chose Wednesday for the national rally because lawmakers met to talk about an assault weapons ban. This heated debate comes as we hear an alarming prediction out of Chicago: expect several more
mass shootings this year.
A Walmart in El Paso, Texas - 22 killed. Just hours later, nine dead in Dayton, Ohio. Back in Texas again, seven more people murdered in a drive-by shooting spree.
Just some of the latest mass shootings in America and certainly not the last, according to Professor Lori Post.
“Oh, we're going straight up, it's not a guess at all,” Post said. “We’re going to have several more this year.”
Doctor Post says her research at Northwestern Medicine shows there will be four to eight more mass shootings this year.
“The kill counts are getting bigger, the number of injured are getting bigger,” Post said.
Post says her med-students at Northwestern were seeing so many gunshot wounds in the ER that they wanted to study the problem. They researched 38 years of mass shootings in which four or more people died.
Common threads among shooters included access to guns, exposure to violence and hate.
“Then you have a cocktail that's lethal, you have a mass shooter,” Post said.
Post insists mental illness is not the problem. Back to that Walmart shooting in El Paso, Post points out that the shooter planned the strike meticulously, down to his protective earmuffs -- not calculations most people with mental conditions can carry out.
Instead, she discovered hate speech often emboldened shooters.
“There is an increase, a noticeable upward trajectory of hate crimes. People that go to kill based on race and ethnicity, migrant status, religion. That has definitely increased in the last 3 or 4 years,” Post said.
She also found an increase in assault weapons, which were used in 81 percent of all mass shootings.
In the massacre in Dayton, the shooter killed nine people and wound 27 others in just 32 seconds.
Post says a “good guy” with a gun does not stop that.
“It’s a silly romantic notion and everybody would like to be a hero, but it just doesn't work out that way,” Post said.
So what can cut down on all these shootings? Post says her research shows two clear answers: ban assault weapons and start background checks for every gun purchase and transfer, making it the same in every state.
“If 98 percent or whatever of gun sales already go through background checks, why not just tighten that up?” asked Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
Congressman Kinzinger now backs universal background checks and other gun regulations he previously opposed -- such as raising the age to buy a rifle from 18 to 21.
"And so the reality is what can we do to begin to mitigate the issue of shooting and violence in our schools? And I think one of the things is to say we need to raise long-gun age purchase to 21,” Kinzinger said.
The summer shootings led to Kinzinger's change of heart and break from others in the Republican Party.
But all eyes remain on President Trump to say whether he'll back new gun laws.
“If nothing changes, if everything stays the same, we should see fewer days between shootings and an increase in shootings,” Post said.
So far this year, Doctor Post says 62 people have been murdered in mass shootings with another 98 wounded. She warns we should all brace for more.
At Capitol Hill, no concrete action came from the hearing on a proposed assault weapons ban -- and with the focus now on impeachment, it is not certain when guns will reclaim the spotlight.
