Larry Thompson

The genesis for this piece came on the day of an active shooter drill on my campus, while discussing with students how they have grown up always thinking about escape plans in public places wondering when the gunfire was to start. Utilizing data from gunviolence.org, which tracks real-time statistics about mass shootings in the United States, I created a calendar-like installation to exhibit the volume of mass shootings. While some of the larger ones, such as the recent tragedies in El Paso and Dayton captivate the news for a day or two, mass shootings are happening nationwide almost daily, and if the body count isn’t high enough, never even register in the daily news cycle. Lost in between the large shootings are the ones that don’t make the news, that still claim four or more victims to injury by a single shooter. The intent of this piece is to show just how pervasive the problem is in our society, and hope that a conversation will commence where both sides of the political spectrum can at least start to come together on points of agreement so perhaps there aren’t as many dark days in the future.