Sandy Hook was one month ago and the President is having a big news conference tomorrow about the administrations response re: gun violence. Is that "slow"? "drastic action"? something else?
I think you need to calibrate your moral barometer a bit better.
We are rapidly developing a "criminalized culture" to which the easy and popular response to everything is "put them in jail". Sandy Hook was a horrible tragedy, to be sure, but in my mind, our growing population of prisoners is a much more concerning problem.
Violence as a cause of death has continued to drop in the US. It is no longer in the top 15 ways people die in the US[1]. The worst year for massacres in the US was 1929 and worst occurred in 1927 (45 dead by explosive).
Yet suicide is in the top 10 and mental illness is under funded. Risk factors are what the President should concentrate on, not the incident of the moment. A President coming up to the podium and announcing a serious attempt at dealing with mental illness in this country would fix more problems than something that is declining without the President's attention.
Citation needed.
2,996 people died in the September 11 hijacking, including the 19 hijackers. That is the worst massacre that I'm aware of in US history.
If you just want domestic violence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing killed 167 people in 1995.
Prohibition era violence may have created more massacres, but they were much smaller. And the people killed were much less likely to be innocent bystanders.
Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. 1929 had the most in number according to Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has done a lot of research in the area.
He also point out that although there was a rise in mass shootings from 1960 to 1990, a decline started in 2000.
I should also point out that neither incident you cited had guns involved.
There may have been a decline in mass shootings since 2000, but in the last several years there has been a cluster. Whether this is an anomaly or a trend is too early to tell.
I agree that Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. But compared to the number of gangsters killed, the proportion was much lower than the massacres that I pointed to. For example in 9/11, hijackers and armed military personnel were under 2.5% of the fatalities.
My point, is that gun violence is not increasing, instead it is decreasing despite the media attention. If the media and people would look at actual risk factors in our world, we would be a lot better off. Mental illness is such a thing.
GGP commment made an unqualified statement "action in government is slow" adding that the idea of "drastic action" was a "fantasy". I countered by noting that in the present day the government is moving very fast on at least one particular issue. We will know tomorrow whether the action is drastic. Full stop.
How many mass murders has it taken to get to this point? How is that "drastic" or "very fast"? Oh, wait, there's a commission that might "recommend" we re-enact legislation that expired a few years ago? How is that "drastic"? How is that "very fast"?
As the GGP said, what's gonna happen first is an investigation and a review. Why the need to jump to "vigilante justice"?
The end result of "vigilante justice" is going to be more young people squandering their careers and futures, creating further justification for harsh sentencing and prosecution of "hacktivists", and probably just more work and demand for the very people they are trying to unseat.
Blowing this situation out of proportion and encouraging rash behavior is not going to solve the underlying problems.
Prosecutor overreach is a much more widespread problem, though absolute quantification is difficult. It isn't hard to rate it as a much bigger problem than mass murders, because mass murders are a very, very small problem right now. It may not rate next to our other problems we face right now, though.
(If saying mass murders aren't a big problem right now bothers you, let me also make this observation, which is that non-mass murders are also a much bigger problem than mass murders. Just the murders that can be directly traced to our War on Drugs, many of which also hit school-aged children, is a much larger problem than mass murder right now. Murders in Chicago alone is a significantly larger problem than mass murders.)
Regulations mandating safer showers and bathtubs would save more lives, and far more hospital visits, than getting rid of all of the assault weapons in the USA.
As for prosecutorial overreach, I believe that it is part of the reason why the USA has a higher portion of its population in prison than ANY other country in the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... if you don't believe me. And our "justice" system is not race neutral. South Africa under apartheid did not imprison as high a portion of its black population as the US does now. In major cities about 80% of black males have a criminal record. This contributes to their difficulty in getting jobs. Which in turn contributes to the economic circumstances that perpetuate these shocking statistics.
The same issue was addressed by the Brady Bill 18 years ago, so it's not like the issue hasn't been addressed before.
That response's effectiveness is another story, of course (hint: it wasn't).
We supposedly live in a civilised society I would say 1 death is 1 too many.