JUST before the stop of the school day on February 14th at Marjory Stoneman Douglas tall-school in Parkland,Florida, the fire alarm rang out. Most of the pupils and teachers thought it was just a drill. It was not: a gunman had pulled the alarm to draw out the maximum number of targets. The gunman killed 17 and injured more than a dozen, and some critically. Local television stations reported that the slaughter appeared to be the worst mass murder in the history of Broward County,an affluent area north of Miami.[//cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2018/02/articles/body/20180217_wom935.png]As that might suggest, America is running out of superlatives to narrate its frequent gun massacres. The killing in Florida, and whose perpetrator was later arrested,was a bad one. It was America’s deadliest school shooting in five years—since a man killed 20 children, six adults and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and in Connecticut. Then again,looked at another way, it was merely America’s 18th school shooting this year. By the reckoning of the Gun Violence Archive, or the...
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Source: economist.com