Dear Commons Community,

A new paradigm evolved yesterday in American mass murder wherein an individual is stopped at a traffic light and then goes on a spree of shooting random people while driving a car.  It wasn’t in a school.  It wasn’t in a church.  It wasn’t in a store.  It wasn’t at a concert.  The murderer just drove up and down roads shooting at cars, people, stores and anything else he saw.  The result is another community devasted by a man with a gun.   As reported in the New York Times:

“Five people were killed and at least 21 others [These figures have been upped to seven people killed and 22 injured.] were injured in a brazen daylight drive-by mass shooting in the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa on Saturday, as a gunman drove on the highways and streets opening fire on residents, motorists, and shoppers, the authorities said.

The attack at the start of Labor Day weekend terrified sister cities 20 miles apart with a combined population of 263,000, less than a month after gunmen killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, in back-to-back massacres that stunned the nation and revived the debate in Washington over gun control.

The chief of the Odessa Police Department, Michael Gerke, said at a news conference on Saturday that the attack had begun after a traffic stop. The gunman fled the police and hijacked a postal truck, firing at civilians as he made his way into Odessa.

Three law enforcement officers and a toddler were among those wounded, before the police shot and killed the gunman, a white man in his mid-30s, near a movie theater on the outskirts of Odessa. The police said the gunman’s motive was not immediately clear.

It was, in some ways, a sadly familiar scene of panic in America, as people suddenly ducked for cover or fled businesses as gunshots rang out. In Texas alone since 2017, there have been four mass shootings including the one Saturday. And yet in other ways it was unique, as the panic typically concentrated in one school or store spread for miles across the Texas flatlands amid early reports that there were multiple gunmen.

Police officers and state troopers warded drivers off the highways as businesses across the two cities shut their doors. Universities went on lockdown. A television station in Odessa evacuated its studio while its reporters were covering the breaking news live on the air.”

At the time of this posting, the identity of the shooter and his motive was not made public.”

There is one thing common to all the mass killings in the country, the killers had easy access to guns.

Tony

NOTE:  After this posting, the killer was identified as Seth Ator.  No motive has been established.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.