BALTIMORE — Because of its scope — 30 shot, two dead — Sunday’s horror in the Brooklyn neighborhood puts Baltimore squarely in the second category of gun violence in America: not the day-to-day carnage we’ve seen for years, but the mass casualties that have caused sudden death and searing pain in cities, suburbs and rural areas and made national, even international news.
To be sure, we have had shootings that qualify as mass shootings before, but the number of victims in Sunday’s insanity will now put Baltimore higher on the list of communities left bloodstained by these extravagant acts of violence.
The city already had a reputation as one of the most violent communities in America. But that was from the daily shootings, fatal and nonfatal, that have been occurring here for decades.
