WaPo: Mass Shootings as American as ‘Apple Pie, Baseball’

The Washington Post ran a piece on the reported July 2 DC Navy Yard shooting, declaring that mass shootings are now as American as “apple pie, baseball.”

They used additional words and phrases such as “shots fired, lockdown, sirens, locate your loved ones, [and] broadcast their status,” implying these are all now part of our national lexicon.

The author of the WaPo article, Petula Dvorak, reflected on whether to tell her kids that the 2013 attack at the DC Navy Yard, “when Aaron Alexis killed 12 people, was isolated and rare.” She said that explanation would lead to explaining the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook, which would lead to discussing the heinous attack at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which leads to the determination that mass shootings are now as American as apple pie and baseball.

Dvorak contends that the alleged imminence of a mass shooting produces a “collective PTSD” that “makes us all certain we’ll encounter an ‘active shooter’ in our lifetime. At the movies. In the mall. At the grocery store. In our church. In our office. In our school.” And Dvorak says this “collective PTSD” is not without merit, as there are so many guns in America, and the owners of those guns point to “a constitutional amendment written in 1791, at a time when arms were cartoonish muskets or flintlock pistols that made one, harum-scarum shot, then had to be reloaded.”

Dvorak then suggested we combine our Fourth of July celebrations with a thorough examination of the gun culture we have maintained for 224 years. She made no mention of the fact that the three mass shooting examples she provided—the DC Navy Yard, Sandy Hook, and the Charleston church—all took place in gun free zones.

All three incidents were in areas with 100 percent gun control, which criminals readily ignored.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.