SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Eleven people were wounded and one killed after a concert in Dallas. Five more people were hurt when they were shot on a rural road in South Carolina.
Sunday's horrific melee in Sacramento was just one of three mass shootings in the United States over the weekend — evidence, some experts believe, that extreme cases of gun violence are becoming so routine that they almost fade into the background.
"We only hear about some of these shootings," said James Densley, a criminal justice professor in Minnesota who runs a mass-shooting database called The Violence Project. "It kind of breaks my heart to have to say that."
The worst mass shooting in Sacramento history left six people dead and 12 wounded, generating the kind of instant ritual that almost invariably accompanies mass shootings in America. Gun-control advocates, including President Joe Biden, demanded stricter laws. Gun-rights advocates warned against a rush to judgment and said policymakers should focus on other contributor to violence, such as mental health or socioeconomic factors.
Densley said certain types of mass shootings tend to stick in the public's memory longer, such as those involving children or people who clearly were targeted because of their ethnicity or religion — think of the massacres at a Black church in South Carolina in 2015, a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 or a New Zealand mosque in 2019.
Others are more likely to recede from the public's consciousness, said Densley, who teaches at Metro State University in Minnesota.
"Some of these have become white noise, particularly if it occurs in communities of color," he said. "You barely hear about them any more."
Sacramento's shooting involved an exchange of gunfire outside a collection of nightclubs. It appears most if not all were people of color.
City officials were adamant that they wouldn't regard Sunday's incident as business as usual.
"We can never accept it as normal," Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at a Sunday afternoon press conference at police headquarters.
But he also said Sacramento need to move on and not become paralyzed. He encouraged residents to keep coming downtown.
"We also have to live our lives," he said. "We don't want to shut down."
Some elected officials fear that it can become too easy to move on.
"We know the daily toll (from gun violence) is in every community," said Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose. "It should be eliciting protests at every city hall, at every state capitol. Instead, there's this conspiracy of inaction."
Liccardo knows the routine all too well. Last spring an apparently disgruntled employee shot nine of his co-workers to death at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority complex in downtown San Jose. The man then killed himself.
Although the property damage disrupted transit service for weeks, Liccardo said he was startled at how quickly life seemed to return to normal in San Jose.
"I was heartened by the response of thousands of community members ... who contributed to help the families, who went to vigils," he said. "That being said, we have very short memories."
San Jose did take some action afterward. In January the City Council passed an ordinance requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance. Another ordinance requires them to pay a $25 fee, which the city will donate to nonprofits engaged in programs that aim to prevent violence. Liccardo said the fee is being challenged in court by gun-rights groups.
Sweeping legislative changes are rare. While liberal California has 107 gun-control laws in effect, more than any other state, experts say it can be difficult to sustain momentum for ambitious gun control on a nationwide level. Democrats have despaired about their inability to revive the federal ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004.
Ben Newman, a UC Riverside political scientist who's studied mass shootings, said high-profile incidents bring about a flurry of political activity from ordinary citizens: online searches for information, posts on Twitter, donations to gun-control groups.
But this activity sometimes turns to apathy as proposals for reform get ground up by the political process or the judicial system.
When there's a shooting, "there is an uptick nationally of people engaging in political behaviors on gun control," Newman said.
But there's scant evidence that this activity translates into an increase in voter registration or turnout, he said. People get disheartened when "these events keep happening and there is no policy change," he said.
This was confirmed in a 2020 study published in the American Political Science Review, an academic journal. "Shootings have little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States," the authors wrote.
Indeed, gun-control groups reacting to the Sacramento shooting — and others that occurred last weekend — begged Americans to step up and do something.
"We haven't seen the changes we need to take place happen," said Nicole Hockley, co-founder and chief executive officer of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit founded by parents of children killed in the 2012 elementary school tragedy in Connecticut.
"People have decided that nothing is going to happen, and they become apathetic to the situation," said Hockley, who lost her son Dylan in the shooting.
Hockley said when people focus on policy changes, they become frustrated, such as when the Senate in 2013 rejected a bipartisan bill that would have expanded background checks for gun sales.
"It was low hanging fruit," Hockley said. "But these things have become so incredibly divisive."
Nevertheless, Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor at UC Davis Medical Center and director of the university's gun violence research center, said he's optimistic about the prospects for change.
Wintemute believes the mounting death toll will eventually spur grassroots action, the way that the #MeToo movement focused attention on sexual harassment or Americans became progressively more alarmed about climate change.
Wintemute's research has shown that experience with gun violence is pervasive in California; more than 4 million of its residents know at least two people who have been shot on purpose. As more people's lives are touched by violence, they will at some point be spurred to get involved in programs that can deter violence, rather than simply wait for elected officials to fix things, he said.
"As that cumulative experience grows, we will collectively come to a point where we agree we have to do something," Wintemute said.
