There’s a Big Problem With Mass Shooting Stats

By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

A definition like the one used by shooting tracker opens the door to start counting gang violence, drive-by shootings, and other such incidents as “mass shootings”.

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Here’s a look at the data from the last three years.

We have a Congress that has blocked funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct research on gun violence. Why? It’s unsurprising that a shooting with more than 31 casualties consumed the nation’s attention on Wednesday, but it’s a sad commentary on how routine gun violence has become that we tend only to pay attention when there are casualties on such a dramatic scale.

As described in the article titled “The Mission-Oriented Shooter: A New Type of Mass Killer” published in the journal Violence and Gender, a mission-oriented shooter is a person whose mission is to kill as many people as possible, or to achieve maximum lethality.

The Senate defeated two gun control amendments, one that would have expanded background checks for guns purchased online and at gun shows, and another that would have prohibited suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

Twenty days of 2015 saw four or more mass shootings in a single day. The shootings have taken place in 47 separate states. She wrote, “355 shootings this year”.

Nobody should be talking about taking away all guns….But we need leaders who are willing to take steps toward making things tougher on people who would do harm.

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

“We heard something like explosives – big sounds first, then a few seconds…we heard the gunshots”, said an employee of the public health department. “We already know through social science and religion that they way to get people to respond differently is to go against our instincts, to not only talk about [the perpetrator] and their motives, but to spend an inordinate amount of time on the totality of each of the victims and who they were”. Women account for 50 percent of the victims in mass shootings, compared with only 15 percent of overall gun homicides, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, based on media reports from 2009 through July.