A mass-shooting tour of the USA, mostly by train

A few years ago, I took the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans all the way to Loserville, that is, Los Angeles, that is, Trashyville. Such a romantic way to travel. It took two days and two nights.

This is the train’s route. And as I rocked gently and peacefully to the train’s railtrack lullaby, I unexpectedly embarked on a tour of mass murder shootings in the US.

First up, about an hour or so after we had pulled out of the San Antonio station, I was following along our location on Google Maps, and lo and behold, we passed right through a little place called Uvalde. Oh, dear, I thought. This was where almost 20 kids were killed in their elementary school.

To be honest, the San Antonio stop is in the middle of the night, but I guess I was awake because I remember looking at the map and feeling the queasy recognition.

The sunrise found us still in Texas:

And by early afternoon, we had a half hour stop in El Paso. El Paso is at an intersection of sorts: where the Mexican, Texan, and New Mexican borders all meet. El Paso is also where over 20 people were killed at the Wal-Mart, just three years before the Uvalde shooting.

Again came the queasy recognition.

Finally, just a week after this train trip, I went to Boulder, Colorado, from Los Angeles. This time, unfortunately, I sort of kind of had to fly.

Boulder was very beautiful, and brimming with fall colors, and as we were driving around, we suddenly passed a supermarket that tickled a vague memory.

A King Sooper grocery store in Boulder? Hmm, I’d never heard of that grocery chain. Must be a brand local only to Colorado. But we kept passing that grocery store, and something kept gnawing at my memory, and then I saw a sign tacked onto the store: BoulderStrong. Ah, yes. I had seen this grocery store on the news before. Ten people were killed here.

So, within just over a week, I passed through three major mass shooting sites — Uvalde, El Paso, and Boulder — that had all taken place between 2019 and 2022. In total, over 50 people were killed in those three shootings.

Now to double the number of dead: three years before all this, I took an overnight train trip from North Carolina to Orlando, Florida. We got to Orlando at like 10 in the morning, after all night long on the train. But as I looked at the map, again, something familiar popped out at me:

The Amtrak station is a quarter hour walk from the site of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, which happened in 2016. 49 people died in that one. It looks like the nightclub has been torn down since then, and now, there’s a memorial instead.

So you can see many mass shooting locations by train.