Much has been written about the Metropolitan Nashville Police response to the March school shooting massacre of nine students and three adults. Police received the incident call at 10:13 a.m, and 14 minutes later the shooter was dead. The courage of the responding officers was exemplary as they didn’t know how many shooters there were, their location and what weapon(s) the killer(s) possessed.

In the Uvalde, Texas, shooting some police officers were inside the school just three minutes after the gunman entered, yet it took one hour, 14 minutes, eight seconds before he was fatally wounded, having killed 19 students and two teachers.

In response to the withering criticism after the Uvalde slaughter, Sergeant Donald Page of the Uvalde Police Department stated: “You knew that it was definitely an AR [AR-15]. There was no going in … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”

Page’s comments can be dismissed as cowardice, and we expect police officers to be courageous. But when the AR-15 style rifle was first designed for the military in the 1950s, an internal Pentagon memo stated that it was “an outstanding weapon with phenomenal lethality.” Proliferation of such weapons puts police in a difficult and dangerous position. In 2016 and 2017 (latest available data), one in five officers slain in the line of duty was killed with an assault rifle. In some cases, the rounds penetrated their body armor.

The Nashville PD’s rapid response saved lives, but 14 minutes (or less) from notification to the death of the shooter cannot be expected in all school shootings. Police officers can be slowed by traffic and/or weather, and no matter how quickly law enforcement responds it may be too late to save lives.

In October 2017, a shooter armed with 23 guns (including AR-15s), “bump stocks” — that significantly increase rapid fire by “bumping” the trigger against one’s finger — and large capacity magazines opened fire on an outdoor Las Vegas concert audience from a 32nd story hotel room. He killed 60 people. Another 869 were injured, nearly half by gunfire or shrapnel. In about 10 minutes — 600 seconds — the killer fired over 1,000 rounds. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

On a late Saturday night in August 2019 in Dayton’s downtown district, a gunman wielding an AR-15 equipped with a 100 round drum magazine opened fire on people dancing and drinking in the streets, and others standing in line to enter bars. Thirty-two seconds after he fired the first shot, the shooter was killed by police. It’s hard to imagine a faster response time by law enforcement officers. However, in just over a half minute the gunman fired 41 rounds and hit 27 people, killing nine of them.

Radiologist Heather Sher sees gunshot wounds every day, noting that when a round from a typical handgun hits the liver it “appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ.” When an AR-15 round traveling at roughly three times the velocity and “imparting three times the energy” of a handgun bullet strikes a human body, it does extensive, often irreparable, damage.

In 2018, victims from the Parkland, Florida mass shooting were brought to the hospital where Dr. Sher is on staff. She noted the CT scan of one victim showed the liver “looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer …” Dr. Sher stated that when surgeons opened up another young gunshot victim to operate “they found only shreds of the organ hit by the bullet from an AR-15 … There was nothing left to repair.”

Dr. Jeremy Cannon, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, stated that if an AR-15 round hits an arm or a leg victims can need a dozen surgeries over months. “Some eventually decide to undergo an amputation if there is severe pain in the limb and it’s dysfunctional.”

Many victims of AR-15 gunshots never make it to trauma centers as their wounds are so severe (often struck multiple times) they “bleed out” quickly. This was the case with the Parkland victims. Speaking of the these individuals, Dr. Sher stated: “Most of them died on the spot, they had no fighting chance at life.”

The number of school shootings has risen rapidly in recent years. From 1999 through 2017, the country averaged 11 school shootings annually with never more than 16 in a single year. In 2018, violent incidents started climbing, with 46 shootings in 2022.

The Washington Post examined more than 180 school shootings committed by juveniles since the Columbine High School (Colorado) massacre in 1999. In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, 86% of the weapons were obtained from the homes of parents, relatives and friends.

Between 1990 and 2020, the United States manufactured or imported just over 24.4 million AR-15 and AK style rifles, about 813,000 a year. In 2020, that number increased to 2.8 million. The AR-15, according to industry figures, is the best-selling rifle in the country. Almost every major gunmaker in the U.S. now produces its own version of this rifle. About one in 20 households (roughly 16 million people) own at least one of these weapons, according to data compiled by the Washington Post. Firearm manufacturers have seen a dramatic surge in revenue, taking in about $1 billion from the sale of AR-15 style weapons in the past decade. Some gun manufactures saw their earnings triple as gun death increased.

As mass shootings increase so do gun sales. In 2022, Time Magazine reported “studies show that mass shootings often precede an increase in gun sales and a rise in the share prices of publicly-traded firearms manufacturers.” In other words, they can be good for gunmakers’ bottom lines. One reason for the spike in gun sales is that many people believe the latest mass murder will result in stricter gun control laws, but that rarely, if ever, happens. Some people are forever changed when a loved one is a mass murder victim. Other individuals realize a financial gain.

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego. This is part one of a two-part commentary. A full list of sources will be published online on Saturday along with the final part of this commentary.