Washington’s 40,302 Gunshots Go Unheard Around the Nation
Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak argues that gun violence only earns attention if the locations and victims are high-profile, citing the "silence" surrounding the high homicide count in D.C. as an example.
Landwebs
Although a trigger was pulled at least 40,302 times in 2018, 2019 and 2020 in the nation’s capital, the nation and the world heard about very few of those shootings as news coverage continues to turn elsewhere, writes Petula Dvorak in a column for the Washington Post. When gun violence in D.C. was able to garner national attention it was first for one shooting outside the Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium on July 17 and another nearby a high-end downtown restaurant district that Dvorak claims wrongly made upper-class celebrants the face of D.C.’s gun violence.
However, long-time residents of D.C., and those raised in the city’s projects, frustrated that D.C.’s homicide rate is climbing back toward what it was when they were young, wonder if the attention that both high-profile shootings received isn’t a good thing. Dvorak points out that most gun violence today is related more to personal vendettas between young, inexperienced men than to drugs, and that when it’s those young men shooting one another, the outrage doesn’t make it past their neighborhoods. At least eight children have been shot, not all fatally, since last July, most of which few have heard about. Dvorak adds that, while Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) declared gun violence a public health emergency in February, the city’s epidemic of gun violence remains unscrutinized by the nation’s news cycles.
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