Last Month Was the First March Without a School Shooting in the United States Since 2002 | 22 Words

For the first March in nearly 2 decades, there were no school shootings across the United States last month.

Keep scrolling to see why people don't see this as a thing to celebrate at all...

Let's begin by stating the obvious...

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 What defines a "mass shooting?" The term "mass killings" is defined by the Justice Department as 3 or more killings in a single episode, excluding the death of a gunman.

Though there is no legal definition for the phrase "mass shootings..."

It can be gathered quite loosely with the definition of a "mass killing" because that's exactly what it is, isn't it?

And our country has been ravaged by horrific mass shootings for decades...

And why is that? Because our government seems to think that it's more important for a person to "have the right to bear arms" than it is to have the right to live safely in their community.

We even have a "Mass Shooting Tracker."

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 When a country needs a website to keep track of its nearly-daily mass shootings, you know things need to change. The Mass Shooting Tracker is a crowd-sourced database of U.S. mass shootings, with the website defining a “mass shooting" as a single outburst of violence in which 4 or more people are shot.

The website keeps track of our country's mass shootings.

via: Mass Shooting Tracker

 And it has laid out the horrifying statistics plain and clear in a graph that organizes each shooting and the number of fatalities by month and year. The numbers speak for themselves and highlight just how dangerous our country has become.

It's time for our government to wake up.

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 Because the number of mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2019 has outpaced the number of days this year, according to a gun violence research group.

And when schools are the targets of these mass shootings...

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 It doesn't seem to make a difference, at all.

By September 2019, there had already been twenty-two school shootings during the year...

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 According to CNN, twenty-two shootings have taken place in American schools so far, with the most recent being in Alaska in July, in which a teenager was shot during a fight at the basketball court of Williwaw Elementary school.

But mass school shootings still haunt us as a nation...

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 One of the earliest recorded mass school shootings dates back to 1966, in which an engineering student at the University of Texas killed seventeen people and injured thirty-one during a shooting rampage. This was the deadliest school shooting until the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007.

The memories of the thousands lost to school shootings are cherished...

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 And despite the efforts to keep the memories of those lost alive, there are still individuals out there who chose to disrespect the memories of these tragedies.

A fashion brand was recently noticed recently for all the wrong reasons...

Bstroy, a "neo-native, post-apocalypse streetwear brand" from the U.S, depend strongly on their Instagram account to advertise their quirky and, let's face it, overpriced fashion.

Their Spring 2020 collection dropped last year...

They began showcasing the menswear collection on Instagram and it was what everyone would expect from Bstroy - edgy, quirky, and just a little weird.

But there were certain garments that ruffled the politically correct feathers of our nation...

Bstroy featured 3 different hoodies in the collection, and all the hoodies are designed to look like they have survived a school shooting. If you think that sounds problematic, then just wait until you see them...

The first hoodie featured the Columbine logo.

Columbine High School of Colorado watched a mass shooting unfold back in April of 1999. Twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve students and one teacher before each of them committed suicide.

Twenty-one more people were left severely injured...

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 The attackers also planted bombs around the campus but luckily, they failed to detonate. The Columbine shooting sadly went on to inspire many "copycats" in the future who went on to conduct even more mass shootings in schools and colleges.

The next hoodie featured was one displaying the Sandy Hook school logo.

On December 14th, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza went into Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut and shot and killed twenty-six people - including children aged between 6-7 years old. He had shot and killed his mother before driving to the school and committing these horrific murders.

Sandy Hook remains to be the deadliest mass shooting at high school grade in America.

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 It is also the fourth-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history.

The final hoodie on display took on the logo of Stoneman Douglas.

The Stoneman Douglas high school shooting took place in February of 2018 in Florida, killing eighteen people and injuring seventeen more. Nikolas Cruz was a nineteen-year-old expelled student who opened fire on the school with a semi-automatic rifle.

Why wasn't anything done in the past about Nikolas Cruz?

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 In both 2016 and 2017, the sheriff's office received a number of tips about Cruz's threats to carry out a school shooting. He had previously posted on Youtube and on social media talking about his plans to conduct a mass shooting, but the authorities dismissed these tips which eventually lead to Cruz killing all of these innocent people.

People instantly slammed Bstroy for the insensitive design...

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 Bstroy made sure each hoddie featured tiny details, such as holes cut into them to mimic that of bullet holes. On Instagram, comments began flooding in, such as: "My dead classmates should not be a f****** fashion statement."

People continue to live through this trauma...

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 "I lived through this," another person wrote. "To make money off of something pathetic like this is disgusting. You don't even know how it is to live every day with reminders everywhere you go."

But, amid the current global pandemic...

Some news has come to light surroudning school shootings.

Last month reportedly marked the first March without a school shooting in the United States... since 2002.

Robert Klemko tweeted that the last time there was a March with no shootings was nearly 2 decades ago, and even that was a close call. His tweet started to gain attention very quickly, with some questioning the stats behind it, as well as debating which kind of gun violence-related incidents could be defined as being a "school shooting."

In follow-up tweets, Klemko pointed to stats from EverytownResearch.org...

And stated that commenters shouldn't rely solely on Wikipedia for school shooting information.

In a country where these incidents are all too frequent...

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 Many would think this is something to be celebrated.

However...

The stats are a likely result of the fact that most schools in the country have been shut down during the month because of the global pandemic.

In fact, according to reports, gun sales increased significantly during the last month.

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 According to The Week, March came in as the second-busiest month ever for gun sales. A CNN report from late March also cited online ammunition retailer, Ammo.com, as having picked up on ammunition sales increases of more than one-thousand percent in Colorado, 945 percent in Arizona, and 897 percent in Ohio.

Many raised the same point.

"It shouldn't take a pandemic."

Looks like several people think this is far from something to be celebrating.

The debates around gun control continue to rage on...