October 2017. If you hadn’t already noticed through this recap or news in general, mass shootings occur regularly in the present day United States. We’ve become largely numb to the impact of gun violence. This is partially because the violence is generally concentrated in poor areas, and because some people are obsessed with their guns. Conservatives don’t believe that restricting gun ownership would curb gun violence. Seriously.
- Mass shooting: Over 500* people were injured at a music festival in Las Vegas when a depressed guy fired over 1000 bullets into the crowd. He had purchased 33 guns in the year before the shooting. Another 58 people were killed in the shooting. After the shooting was over, it only took 50 hours for 58 more people in the US to die from gun violence.
- A region of Spain called Catalonia tried to create a declaration of independence in an attempt to form their own country. They weren’t recognized as a country, and Spain put most of the leadership in jail. Throughout the month, there was a brutal police/military crackdown throughout the region.
- Florida and Louisiana declared states of emergencies in response to the ongoing hurricane season.
- Harvey Weinstein, a mega-powerful entertainment executive, was exposed for sexually harassing and assaulting women, then settling lawsuits for decades. This popularized the #MeToo movement which encouraged women to speak out about instances of sexually harassment and abuse. The #MeToo movement was actually started 10 years earlier and was more specifically focused on minority women, but it took this incident for the majority of the country to pick it up and run with it.
- Daphne Caruana Galizia, a globally known anti-corruption journalist and blogger, was murdered with a car bomb outside her home in Malta.
- President Trump was blasted for a disrespectful phone call he made to the widow of a soldier who was killed in Africa, in the country Niger. Still, most Americans (including congress members) have no idea what we are doing all over Africa.
- A study was released that pollution causes 1 out of every 6 deaths worldwide.
- The new White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, said that a “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” This blatant white supremacy, somehow honoring the fight FOR slavery, gave us a little more clarity into Kelly, and how he could wind up in the current administration.
Footnotes are for people from the future:
*Just in case you missed that, it was over 500 people injured and 58 killed. People want to argue over things like how to define “mass” shooting, or what kind of gun violence is the worst. It feels intellectually dishonest, however, to pretend that heavier restrictions wouldn’t reduce the total amount of gun violence. Other countries make fun of the US when it comes to this.