Grim reports of mass shootings in our country have dominated many news cycles this year. But you may not have heard about the one in Utah in which seven people were killed and the killer shot himself.
There’s a reason for this. The shootings which make headlines and lead national news shows are those which take place in public settings — a doctor’s office in Atlanta, a bank in Nashville or an outlet mall in a Dallas suburb. The Utah shooting happened early in January in a private home in a small rural community.
“I kept asking for help and you wouldn’t listen. I would rather rot in hell than put up with another day of this manipulation and control over me,” wrote Michael Haight, 42, who shot his wife, Tausha, his mother-in-law who had recently moved in because of worries for her daughter’s safety, and his five children before killing himself. From all accounts, it was his wife who was the victim of manipulation and control before the shootings, not Haight.
The Haight murders aren’t even included in Wikipedia’s list of this year’s mass shootings, although the more authoritative Gun Violence Archive includes them in its tally. Incidents in which four or more people are killed in addition to the shooter take place twice as often in private as they do in public, but get much less notice. This USA Today article, from which the above graph is taken, paints a grim picture.
Whenever there’s a mass shooting in some public place we hear that old debate over whether the problem is guns or mental health. We seldom consider that issue in the context of mass shootings which take place in the privacy of people’s homes. This case is an example of how this complicated question can become even more difficult when the murder occurs behind closed doors
The family of Tausha Haight and her mother, Gail Earl, released a statement after the shootings claiming that guns that the two women might have used to defend themselves were…
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