Bunch: The mass shootings that America forgot

It was story that happened last year on the streets of Philadelphia -- and it was impossible for anyone to forget. Gunmen firing with wanton disregard into a Father's Day picnic in West Philadelphia, wounding 10 people, including a 1-year-old baby.

"We just heard shots and I got up, I picked my baby up and I just started running," Valerie Jones, the mother of the infant struck with two shotgun pellets, told NBCPhiladelphia at the time. "I panicked and I just started screaming, 'my baby got shot, my baby got shot.'"

"It looks like they just randomly fired down the street and hit anyone in their way," said Philadelphia Police Lt. John Walker said at the time.

OK, I wasn't being fully honest with that introduction. The truth is that a couple of other intrepid Philadelphia crime reporters, along with me, didn't recall that story at all -- perhaps because, thankfully, none of the party-goers died in this mass shooting. The gunning-down of 10 people might have drifted into complete obscurity were it not mentioned briefly in a noteworthy front-page investigation in the New York Times this week about the epidemic of mass shootings in America.

The fact that this episode of domestic terrorism was basically a one-day, back -of-the-paper story in the city where it occurred basically proves the main point of the Times investigation: That for all the hype about gun violence in America, what it called "the daily drumbeat" of mass shootings largely goes unnoticed.

For every high-profile incident at a suburban shopping mall that gets elevated to national cable TV "Breaking News" fodder, there are scores of incidents that get blown off -- when they occur in low-income urban neighborhoods. In 2015, the newspaper reported, there were some 358 mass shootings in America in which four or more people were wounded or killed. Nearly one every day.

Here's an excerpt from the NYT piece:

The divide is racial as well. Among the cases examined by The Times were 39 domestic violence shootings, and they largely involved white attackers and victims. So did many of the high-profile massacres, including a wild shootout between Texas biker gangs that left nine people dead and 18 wounded.

Over all, though, nearly three-fourths of victims and suspected assailants whose race could be identified were black. Some experts suggest that helps explain why the drumbeat of dead and wounded does not inspire more outrage.

"Clearly, if it's black-on-black, we don't get the same attention because most people don't identify with that. Most Americans are white," said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston. "People think, 'That's not my world. That's not going to happen to me.' "

Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor, who is black, said that society would not be so complacent if whites were dying from gun violence at the same rate as blacks. "The general view is it's one bad black guy who has shot another bad black guy," he said. "And so, one less person to worry about."

The ex-Philly mayor is one of the more outspoken characters in the story, also noting that he got grief in office for talking too much about crime within the black community. "Some people got upset," he said. "I said, 'I'll stop talking about it when you stop killing each other.' "

The story makes clear, though, that mass shootings are a hard discussion because there's no one-size-fits-all solution. In urban neighborhoods, cops note that a lot of crime is described as "gang-related" although the gangs aren't really gangs but just amorphous groups of teens or young adults. Some wonder if video games has desensitized a generation to real violence. Some wonder how much minor beefs get blown out of proportion on social media. Some note that more bystanders are getting wounded because the gunmen are too drunk or high to shoot straight. Fewer guns on the streets would sure help...but how to achieve that?

In other words, the story is short on solutions. But that's not really the point of this exercise. The point was to quantify a major problem that no one had even bothered to quantify. They say a journey of 1,000 miles starts with the first step...so when it comes to mass shootings in the big city, only 999.999 miles to go.