Target Rich Environment

 A Kroger's grocery store in Tennessee. Reminiscent of a King Soopers in Colorado. A supermarket where people go to buy food for their families. Not to dodge bullets. 

And yet, that's what happened. In Collierville, the body count was much lower than the one in Boulder. But it did raise a question for me about mass shootings: Why are they still happening? What efforts need to be made in order to make shopping for groceries safe? Or going to the movies? Or the Garlic Festival? Or the local high school? Those of us blessed with more than our share of snark pointed out that while we were in lockdown, school shootings ceased. If only you could do your marketing via Zoom. 

Okay. Now my secondary question: When they say that one person was killed in the Tennessee Kroger's shooting, they are pointedly leaving out the shooter who killed himself. The death toll was really two. Apparently, self-inflicted gunshots get you an asterisk. The shooter in Boulder was shot by law enforcement, but only wounded. He was not included in the list of those injured. Even though he was. Technically. 

Which sends me back to 1999 and the Columbine High School Massacre, accounts of which report twelve students and one teacher killed. And then the addition of two other students who happened to be the shooters who finished up their day by shooting themselves. That would be fourteen dead students by my count. The question here is more about "victims."

Would I argue that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were victims? Not in the way that the other thirteen were. Or even the dozens who were injured by their attack. The last thing I would want to drum up here is sympathy for the devils. Instead, I would encourage us to figure out a different scoring system, which takes into account human lives lost. The math isn't that hard, not on paper anyway. 

The challenge comes from looking hard at how we want to want to acknowledge the true cost of continuing to do business this way. I would advocate for shading the numbers to the high end so that the tally reflects the experience. If five shooters killed two people in a Whole Foods and then all five of them shot themselves, I think seven people died. Two "innocents," and five not so much. 

Or maybe we should just stop having mass shootings so I can go back to thinking about how upset I am that Chris Pratt was cast as Mario the Plumber.