Summer of Blood

This fall, Detective Fiction is yet again going to be wresting with the psychological, political, and cultural factors behind the U.S.'s off-the-charts levels of gun death--far higher than any other country in the world that is not actually at war or in a civil war.  The New York Times has a good overview of the summer's shootings that involved three or more deaths at a time.  26 mass shootings between Memorial Day and Labor DAy left 126 people dead.

I turned the page and there was a new mass shooting in a South Carolina bar that didn't quite make the Times' 3 person cutoff.

I taught this course last fall in the midst of multiople wildfires and the Thousand Oaks bar shooting that affected a number of students in the course. 

Better luck this year. R.I.P to the victims, whom we never forget. Vivos voco, mortuos plango.