Time magazine cover says 'ENOUGH' in wake of El Paso, Dayton shootings
The word "ENOUGH" cuts through margin-to-margin scribbling of state and city names on Time magazine's latest cover, less than a week since the August weekend that left 31 people dead across two American cities.
"El Paso, TX," "Dayton, OH," and "Gilroy, CA" can be seen within a sea of other towns and cities affected by gun violence in 2019. Twenty-two people were killed and 26 others injured in the El Paso shooting on Saturday, while nine were killed and 27 others injured in Dayton Sunday. Earlier that same week, a gunman shot and killed three people and injured 12 others at a food festival in Gilroy.
TIME's cover is reminiscent of the magazine's cover published April 2, 2018, depicting the survivors of the Parkland mass shooting, with similar font emblazoned across, also reading "ENOUGH."
"We all have our measures of how obscenely normalized domestic terror has become," TIME's editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, wrote in a column about the latest cover. "In my own less than two years in this job, we've run seven of them [covers], from the 2017 massacre at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 58 people to this spring's murder of 50 worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand."
There have been at least 17 deadly mass shootings in the United States so far in 2019, by ABC's count, while hundreds of other mass shootings have been recorded that totaled four or more victims, with injuries, according to the National Gun Violence Archive.
El Paso and Dayton's harrowing events bumped up the average of one mass shooting every 12.7 days this year.
The recent mass shootings have renewed calls for gun legislation, with 2020 Democratic hopeful Rep. Tim Ryan among the politicians calling on Congress to reconvene after the Dayton shooting to take up new legislation.
"We can’t continue to offer up the same condolences again and again with no action to protect our communities," the Ohio representative said in a statement.
However, many politicians are frustrated by Congress' apparent inaction, including Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley who in a press conference alongside Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown Wednesday asked the rhetorical question, "Do I think that we’re going to see another mass shooting tomorrow, or Friday? Probably, because Washington will not move."
President Donald Trump has stated he is "looking into" background checks, speaking at a gaggle before he departed for a visit to both Dayton and El Paso, stopping short of supporting legislation targeting specific guns.
"You have to have a political appetite within Congress, and so far I have not seen that," Trump said on gun legislation. "I have not seen it in terms of certain types of weapons."
"We do have a choice as a society. Not a perfect choice. Or a guaranteed solution," Felsenthal added in his editorial, speaking to Time's cover. "But doing nothing in the face of repeated mass murder in our society is indefensible."
