A Tally Of Mass Shootings In The US

That is how often, on average, shootings that left four or more people injured or dead occurred in the United States this year, according to compilations of episodes derived from news reports.

The San Bernardino shooting is the 355th mass shooting this year, according to a mass shooting tracker maintained by the Guns Are Cool subreddit.

The San Bernardino shooting, in which 14 people were killed and 17 others injured, is the deadliest mass shooting in the US since the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, three years ago, which claimed the lives of 26 people.

Hours after the shooting, grim-faced Obama slammed Congress and gun-rights lobby groups for obstructing reforms of gun control laws.

That means that mass shootings have occurred at a rate of more than one a day in 2015; Wednesday was the 336th day of the year. The shootings have taken place in 47 separate states. Those reactions have become familiar during a span of two years in America when not a calendar week has gone by without an act of mass gun violence.

“The only increase has been in fear, and in the perception of an increase”, says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, told The New York Times. But the frequency with which mass shootings have been reported this year have led to perceptions that this one, particularly shocking, type of violence may be experiencing a surge. The Congressional Research Service tracks shooting cases in which four or more people are killed and, by that standard, the annual figure has tended to range only slightly, from about 20 to 22 cases per year from 1999 to 2013. The primary motive must be mass murder.

But in fact, says Mr. Astor, US cultural norms have shifted in other ways, specifically around the acceptance of violence.

Dr. Jeffrey Simon, a visiting lecturer in political science at UCLA who studies mass shootings with many victims, said that the killers shared no consistent ideological motivation. “A lot of that has been because of the nature of media coverage”.

Such jarring statistics underscore the brutal truth behind the BBC’s report on San Bernardino Wednesday evening, which opened with the chilling words, “Just another day in the United States of America”.

“I have a few friends that don’t go out because they are scared of things like that”, Erie City resident Raymond Martinez said.