As for that inappreciable discussion about when in the New Year you should stop saying “Happy New Year,” we might finally have hit on a solution here in the good old USA: When the number of people killed in mass shootings in January flies past 60, yeah, maybe knock it off.
In little more than three weeks, 67 of us are dead already through this peculiarly American method of predictable carnage, at least as I sit down to write this. But it’s early in the day.
The Lunar New Year came in with a spray of bullets at a dance hall in California, where 11 died in the second of that state’s third mass shooting in eight days. The new year in Alabama brought a significant tweak to that state’s gun laws — you no longer need a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
