Vox claims there have been 45 mass shootings since the start of 2020…

I shouldn’t be surprised.

I shouldn’t be surprised by the tone of vague nebulous blame that Vox lays at the feet of “Wisconsin”. I also shouldn’t be surprised that outlets like Vox have broadened the meaning of ‘mass shooting‘ to include nearly every criminal act involving a firearm discharging at more than one person.

Wisconsin rejected new gun control laws. Then a mass shooting happened.

And yet..

Five people were killed Wednesday when a shooter opened fire at the Molson Coors beer company complex in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

According to local police chief Alfonso Morales, the shooter, a 51-year-old former employee of the brewery, also died as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I will give Vox props for not adding the dead shooter into the victim count to inflate the number from five to six, Everytown will though so don’t worry about him being forgotten. That’s about all good I can grant them though, the claim about 45 mass shootings is coming up oh so swiftly…

For those unsure of their newsworthy orientation on this one, we are talking about the Molson Coors employee who, while still employed as far as I can find at this moment, killed five of his co-workers and then himself. I don’t know what work stresses or home stresses lead to the violent snap but we know the company was going through a lot of changes internally. I suspect either a change in his employment status was imminent or he had reached a social breaking point with one or more of the victims.

I don’t know, but the facts as seen right now seem to indicate this was workplace violence. This was not terrorism, a heist or greater crime against the company, or anything else so complex. This was a man who took his anger out on his place of employment and those he worked with.

This doesn’t make the crime any better or worse, it just frames the motivating factors… a subject that ideologues love to obfuscate to fit the narrative they’ve ascribed to.

Nidal Hasan always comes to mind during conversations on ‘workplace violence’ because of the mental cartwheels needed to fit that descriptor in the place of terrorism. If Major Hassan had left a note that had basically said, “Fuck the Army and just the Army and especially Colonel Fuckface.” before the shooting, it would have been one thing. That would have fallen clearly under the motivational sphere of workplace violence. But, while the official report states workplace violence, Hasan’s motivations fell solidly under the sphere of terrorism too as his contact with Anwar al-Awlaki supports. Al-Awlaki would be later killed in a drone strike by President Obama for his role as an Al-Qaeda recruiter and was the first U.S. Citizen killed by drone and extra-judicially as a terrorist.

But back to the article.

It was at least the 11th mass shooting in Wisconsin since 2004. There have been 45 mass shootings in the US since the beginning of 2020.

There.. it.. is..

There have only been 11 mass shootings in Wisconsin in the last 16 years but there have been 45 mass shootings in the past 59 days? Wisconsin is feeling pretty safe. Yet reports like MAPS listed only 27 incidents in the whole of 2018. Numbers aren’t adding up.

And just hours before the shooting, Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called on lawmakers to push forward legislation aimed at tightening the state’s gun laws.

I’m sure if the Wisconsin legislature had just immediately given into Gov. Evers call for whatever generic box of gun control that was called for, that the shooting at Molson Coors could not have happened. At least that seems to be Vox’s direction.

Of course it is not stated which law would have prevented this shooting. There was either a failure of current under-enforced systems, if the employee was a prohibited person, or there was no background to criminally pick up on. A new rule wouldn’t change these realities, it cannot change them.

In response to Evers, “Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, made it clear that Wisconsin’s gun laws would not change under a Republican-controlled Legislature,” USA Today reported, “reminding voters of the longstanding divide that all but ensures deadly incidents like Wednesday’s aren’t going to spur new gun policies anytime soon.”

And there is the blame game, for everyone except the man who chose to kill his co-workers. It is actively mind-numbing how palpably gun controllers believe in their solutions, as if belief alone will carry the policy to success. The fundamental logical disconnect, that these policy drafters are actively engaged against the free wills and physical freedom to act of other human beings seems to completely escape them.