I’m not sure at what point national opinion-shapers make the call that 2012 is a moment when gun massacres have reached epidemic proportions, or instead consign the carnage to “regular crime news” and stop paying attention to it at all. This morning a “disgruntled worker” opened fire on co-workers at some location near the Empire State Building, killing one person and injuring ten and then getting gunned down by the police.
Is this event “normal” enough–involving an apparent workplace grievance rather than whatever lurid fantasies motivated earlier shooters in Colorado and Wisconsin–to fall off the national radar screen and nestle into the familiar groove of ever-violent local urban TV news? Hard to say. But I’ll say a prayer for the victims and the cops and for everyone who takes their lives into their hands by just undertaking a routine day in the wrong place at the wrong time.
