Do you remember Binghamton shooting?
Morning briefing
The Front Page
Evening update
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
By Ken Tingley
It has become a ritual, at least for me, when the shootings are really bad. Unfortunately, that is the case in our country more often than not these days. There are degrees to mass shootings and how much they shock us. Mostly we are numb to them.
On those days when they shock me again - and usually they don’t - I go online and review one of the lists of mass shootings. There are plenty of them and on Wednesday I found one with a map where I found three New York shootings that I had put out of my mind.
Most of us can reel off the names of the most horrific: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, the church in Texas, the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Las Vegas concert shooting and the church Charleston, S.C.
But how many of us remember the shooting in Watkins Glen?
Or Binghamton?
Or the little town Mohawk, just south of the Thruway near Herkimer?
I didn’t remember any of those shootings.
On Oct. 15, 1992, a man walked into a county office in Watkins Glen - that idyllic little town in the Finger Lakes - complaining about his child support payments. He killed the four people in the office, then himself. That was seven years before Columbine.
On April 3, 2009, a 41-year-old naturalized American citizen from Vietnam walked into the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton where he shot and killed 13 people before taking his own life.
That was just 12 years ago.
Apparently, it was just another day at the office for me as a small-town newspaper editor. I don’t even remember how we played the story.
Four years after that, a man set fire to his home, then drove to John’s Barbershop in Mohawk where he shot four people and killed two. He then drove to Gaffey’s Fast Lube in Herkimer, shooting and killing two more before holing up in an hotel room where police killed him after a long standoff
It’s not that this could happen here, it is that it is already happening everywhere.
The Second Amendment was not a commandment handed down to Moses. It was written by men who owned muskets and hunted for their food. Nobody is coming for anyone’s guns - The Safe Act proved that - but having national background checks and banning military style weapons seems like a reasonable place to start.
It is now nothing more than a license to justify mass murder and any politician - and that would be most of them around here - that continues to defend it is an accomplice.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/
Quote of the Day
“We will soon learn more about the victims of the latest mass shooting even before families have buried the dead from the last one. In time, we will learn more about the killer and a possible motive while politicians will offer thoughts and prayers. Following a high-profile mass killing, the public usually becomes briefly interested in some kind of gun control. But the support always fades.”
Al Tompkins, Poynter Institute
