Have Seattleites become desensitized to the sound of gunfire?
Jul 27, 2015, 1:18 PM | Updated: Jul 28, 2015, 12:55 pm
(AP file photo)
Another day and another gun shot … or three. Has Seattle become so riddled with gunfire that locals have become desensitized to a rising number of shootings?
“We now have so many gunshots, some 227 gunshots have been fired so far (this year) and so far very few people have been hit, which means that gun shots are random around this city,” said KIRO Radio’s Tom Tangney. “And even the Seattle Police Department doesn’t put it on its blotter because there are so many of them.”
“We’re now so used to that, we are not up in arms trying to quell the gunshots,” he said.
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Tangney and co-host John Curley were discussing a recent column by Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat, who wrote that gunfire has become nothing more than background noise for Seattle. Local police rarely report shootings on their own blog unless something dramatic happens, he wrote.
“The good news is that we only cover it if someone gets hit. The bad news is … that more and more of us will start getting hit. [Gunfire] is up 24 percent over last year and 40 percent up since 2013,” Tangney said.
But Curley felt it spoke to a political sentiment that Washington’s stricter, and recently passed, gun laws should have stopped the gunfire trend.
“How can that be? We have stricter gun laws. How is this happening?” Curley said sarcastically. “We need to stop the law-abiding citizens from shooting at us.”
“There are so many people that are armed and rather than screaming or yelling at one another after they get into an altercation about something important, like your car, or your girlfriend or drugs, they just pull out the gun and just shoot at the general direction of someone,” he said.
Curley said that not all gunshots are from shootings, rather, some people choose to fire randomly, such as in Mount Vernon where people shoot at signs. He noted a recent a drive-by shooting occurred where a TV news reporter was taping a story.