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He moved to Idaho for open carry laws, his father told police.
Carry your firearm anywhere, unpermitted, unrestricted.
He then walked into a busy Boise mall, bought food at Sbarro’s and started shooting. A security guard was the first to be killed. Then someone in the elevator at Macy’s. Four other people were injured before Jakob Bergqvist — a tragically troubled young man, a convicted felon with a trail of neglected red flags behind him, and a big proponent of open carry — killed himself.
Police say they still don’t know why he did this. In the year since the Boise Town Square Mall shooting, similar shootings have occurred at a rate of two a day. In the 364 days between the Boise shooting and the Oct. 24 shooting at St. Louis High School, there were 664 shootings in this country in which four or more victims were killed or injured, according to the Gun Violence Archives.
Try to remember something that isn’t Uvalde or Buffalo.
Meanwhile, the national homicide rate has risen sharply (rising 30% in 2020 and remaining flat in 2021.) The overall rate is a separate phenomenon, in many ways, the mass shooting epidemic, yet both are inevitably linked to guns. As rooted in rural red America as urban blue America.
Center-left think tank Third Way analyzed 2020 crime data and found that 8 of the top 10 homicide rates were in conservative rural states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
“Beyond the top 10, we looked at the 2020 homicide rates in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump, compared to the homicide rates in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden,” Third Way reported.
“The rate of 8.20 murders per 100,000 residents in Trump states is 40% higher than the 5.78 murders per 100,000 residents in Biden states. These Biden-voting states include big cities like Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, Baltimore and Minneapolis, where ‘crime is out of control’.
When critics claimed that the murder rate in blue cities was solely due to red states, the Third Way responded that if blue cities were the only source of the problem, blue states would surely have higher murder rates – because they have more blue cities! It also calculated the homicide rates in the top 10 red states without the worst blue cities — taking Jackson out of the calculation in Mississippi, for example — and found that the state rankings were nearly identical.
In other words, the desire to make gun violence an “out there” problem, an urban problem, a Democrat problem — which seems to be the primary desire to make a gun non-issue — won’t last. That’s not to say that cities aren’t experiencing an increase in crime, I suspect the real bigger problem is when it comes to people’s perceptions of safety – visible disorder and the conflation of homelessness with crime.
But beware of simplistic explanations, especially those that treat the question of how we regulate guns as beside the point.
The Gun Violence Archives compiles data on every mass shooting in the country. Talk about doom-scrolling — here’s a random selection between the boys shooting and a year spent at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis:
• Four people were killed and seven were injured at a high school in Oxford, Michigan.
• Four people, including a police officer, died at a home in Rex, Georgia.
• Three people died and one was injured at a 7-Eleven in Pittsburgh.
• Two people died at a Safeway in Bend, Oregon.
• Three people died and seven were injured at a block party in Gary, Indiana.
• Two people died and three were injured at a Houston flea market.
• One person was killed and four others injured at a graduation ceremony in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
• Two people, including a baby, were killed and two others injured at a gas station in Memphis.
• A celebration of the life of a self-inflicted gunman kills one and injures 13 in Baytown, Texas.
• Five people were killed at a church in Sacramento, California.
People shot at houses. People shot in the street. Drive-by shooting. gang violence Domestic disputes gone wrong. People shot up at a church, a grocery store, a gas station, or a school. In city and country.
Six hundred and sixty-four times.
This year alone, 266 children age 11 and younger have been killed and 589 injured in mass shootings. One thousand one hundred and eight teenagers were killed and 3,088 were injured.
The recent St. Louis shooting left a teenager (once again) roaming the halls of a high school with an AR-15 (once again) and hundreds of rounds of ammunition (once again). Bought through the private-seller loophole (again, because he was barred by a licensed dealer’s background check) teachers and students were locked (again) in corners, scared, (again.)
When school officials learned there was a gunman in the school, they made an announcement over the intercom — using the code students and staff were taught for a school shooter: “Miles Davis is in the building.”
Students jumped out of the window. The teachers closed the door. The gunman opened fire, killing a 15-year-old boy and a teacher and wounding seven others, before being shot by police.
do you remember This was last week.
The school board president was asked if there would have been a difference if someone on the school staff had been armed.
“I don’t know how much firepower it will take to stop that guy. You saw the police response, it was huge. It was overwhelming,” he said. “I know what would have been different if this high-powered rifle hadn’t been available to this guy. It would have made a difference.
It was the 67th school shooting of the year. And the year has not passed.
Miles Davis is not in the building. He is all over the country.
He is everywhere.
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