The repetitiveness of multiple killings seems like a staccato burst from some fiendish gun aimed at America's sense of security.
Six commuters killed on a New York train. Four pizza parlor workers slain in a Denver suburb by a man police say is a former employee. Two shoppers gunned down in Oklahoma; the gunman commits suicide. A police officer and four unemployment workers killed in California; police shoot the gunman.In separate work-related shootings on Thursday, a geologist shot and killed his brother and another man before committing suicide in Boise and a Chelsea, Mich., teacher involved in a union grievance was charged with slaying a school superintendent and wounding the principal and a teacher.
All were among mass slayings in a 15-day period beginning Dec. 2.
The workplace toll came on the same day as a Postal Service-sponsored forum on violence on the job.
Six shootings; 22 dead; 22 wounded. What next? Where next?
"It could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. It seems so unpredictable. The idea that it's happening so frequently is unnerving," said James Alan Fox, dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston.
"These types of things tend to feed off each other. Seeing someone else commit this kind of crime can precipitate someone who's angry and bitter. That's why they often come in bunches," said Fox, who co-wrote the book "Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace."
Even in a nation with a violent history and a homicide rate that startles other countries, the body count is mounting at a numbing pace.
Just two weeks after signing the Brady bill requiring a waiting period to purchase handguns, President Clinton used his national radio address last weekend to speak of an "epidemic of violence."
"The crime rate has hit every American community, from our oldest cities to our smallest towns to our newest suburbs," Clinton said.
But to call the murderous trend new is to forget the headlines of summer.
In August, killings came in clusters. At a McDonald's in Kenosha, Wis., a man in jungle fatigues who had left his job and lost his girlfriend killed two people, then himself. In Fayetteville, N.C., a man carrying three guns and shouting about gays in the military killed four people and wounded seven in a restaurant.
That followed a July shooting in San Francisco in which a man embittered about a real estate lawsuit roamed five floors of an office building stalking lawyers. Eight people were killed and six wounded before he shot himself.
On May 6, two postal workers were killed in Dearborn, Mich., and a mail carrier was killed in a post office in Dana Point, Calif. They were the 10th and 11th Postal Service attacks in 10 years.
Rather than picking targets at random, a killer is more likely to lash out at a specific group based on race, gender or profession, experts said. The gunman on New York's Long Island Rail Road train was a 35-year-old black man who left rambling notes raging about whites, Asians and "Uncle Tom Negroes," among other things.
There are no reliable statistics concerning the settings in which shootings occur. And it may not even be part of a pattern.
"When these things go on, they're terribly unnerving," said Murray Strauss, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire. "It's too early to say whether this sequence represents any sort of trend."
So what are we to do? Stop eating Big Macs or pizza? Quit shopping at the mall or riding commuter trains? Bunker ourselves behind dead-bolted doors?
Northeastern's Fox said multiple killings are still a rare event and people are more likely to be struck by lightning than struck down by a mass murderer.
"If we start thinking that the meal in a fast-food restaurant may be our last, or the gift we buy at the mall will be our last, we will victimize ourselves," Fox said.
"You'd be ruining your lifestyle because of a very unlikely event. If you feel that way, you'd probably never get in your car."