Mass shootings haunt nation’s collective conscience. Each breaking-news alert floods the nation with grief, fear, and anger at the countless acts of preventable violence happening in many workplaces such as schools, churches, parks, supermarkets, and other places where people are going about their everyday lives.
Factual Positioning
- Number of mass shootings in the United States, 1966-2023 is approx 415 and They have resulted in
- 1,449 deaths and 3,590 victims injured.
- Mass shootings have been increasing in frequency since 1966-75
- 17 mass shootings in 2011-23
- 179 mass shootings 94.7% of perpetrators were male
- The majority of mass shootings took place mostly at a workplace (30.4%)school (26.1%)
- Average age of mass shooters 34-35 years old
- 74.6% of perpetrators used handguns
- 54.8% of perpetrators were white
Mass shootings in United States on a record pace in the Year in 2023
The United States is setting a record pace for mass killings in the current year 2023 so far, replaying the horror on a loop roughly once a week so far this year.
The carnage has taken 88 lives in 17 mass killings over 111 days. Each time, the killers wielded firearms. Only 2009 was marked by as many such tragedies in the same period of time.
Children at a Nashville grade school, gunned down on an ordinary Monday. Farmworkers in Northern California, sprayed with bullets over a workplace grudge. Dancers at a ballroom outside Los Angeles, massacred as they celebrated the Lunar New Year.
In just the last week, four partygoers were slain and 32 injured in Dadeville, Alabama, when bullets rained down on a Sweet 16 celebration. And a man just released from prison fatally shot four people, including his parents, in Bowdoin, Maine, before opening fire on motorists traveling a busy interstate highway.
Main reason behind it? Gun Access
Higher accessibility and ownership of guns has been cited as a reason for the United State’s high rate of mass shootings. The US has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people; the second highest is Yemen with 52.8 firearms per 100 people. In a Gallup survey conducted in September and October 2020 of 1,035 randomly selected U.S. adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, 30 percent reported personally owning a firearm and 44 percent reported living in a household that owned at least one firearm.
Researchers have found a reduction in the number of mass shooting related homicides while the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place from 1994 to 2004, which had banned certain types of semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15. However, researchers also acknowledged that it was difficult to prove that the ban was the cause of this. Researchers with the RAND Corporation analyzed several studies of the federal ban’s effects on mass shootings and found the evidence of a relationship to be inconclusive.
A study published in PLOS One in 2015 examined mass shootings in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 (and school shootings in the U.S. from 1998 to 2013). The study authors found that the “state prevalence of firearm ownership is significantly associated with the state incidence of mass killings with firearms, school shootings, and mass shootings.
Conversely, the October 2018 PLOS One study used a Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model to assess the impact of state-level gun ownership rates in predicting state-level mass shooting rates (with state-level SMI rates, state-level poverty rates, and state-level population sizes as covariates) that found that state-level gun ownership rates were not statistically significantly associated with the number of mass shootings in each state. The Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model had a better goodness of fit value based upon deviance information criterion than a Bayesian Poisson regression model (which were 102.5 to 145.7 respectively). The researchers then tested the possibility that the relationship between gun ownership and the mass shooting rate was being confounded by gun law permissiveness using the Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model and found that gun law permissiveness was only nominally correlated with gun ownership and that gun ownership was not statistically associated with the mass shooting rate with or without gun law permissiveness being adjusted in the model.
A 2019 study published in The BMJ conducted a cross-sectional time series study of U.S. states from 1998 to 2015; the study found that “States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states. The study specifically found that “A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings. Partially adjusted regression analyses produced similar results, as did analyses restricted to domestic and non-domestic mass shootings.
A 2020 study published in Law and Human Behavior examined the relationship of state guns laws and the incidence and lethality of mass shootings in the U.S. from 1976 to 2018.The study found that “laws requiring permits to purchase a gun are associated with a lower incidence of mass public shootings, and bans on large capacity magazines are associated with fewer fatalities and nonfatal injuries when such events do occur.”[68] The study specifically found that large-capacity magazine bans were associated with approximately 38% fewer fatalities and 77% fewer nonfatal injuries when a mass shooting occurred.
The American Psychiatric Association has endorsed assault weapons bans, high-capacity magazine bans, and universal background checks as a way to curb gun violence in the United States.
