Applying our aforementioned definition of incidents in which four people were killed, Mass Shooting Tracker has 41 entries.
Advertisement
The 12th deadliest shooting occurred in 2013, when a gunman opened fireinside the Washington Navy Yard inWashington, D.C, killing 12 people.
Public health researchers at Harvard University and Northwestern University have confirmed that mass shootings are becoming more frequent, and theSan Bernardino shooting is the latest.
Lankford defines a mass shooter “as one who killed at least four victims”, The Wall Street Journal noted.
In an interview with CBS News shortly after the San Bernardino massacre, President Barack Obama said, “We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently: common-sense gun-safety laws, stronger background checks”.
News reports collected by a Reddit community show there have been 355 mass shootings in 2015. According to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, US citizens were armed with an estimated 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.
There was little acknowledgment of the incident in news media: One local television station covered the shootings in three paragraphs.
He said that changes in news-media coverage and in the availability of news accounts of shootings have led many people to believe that the number of shootings has increased.
The study analyzed episodes involving active gunmen, where a shooting was in progress when law enforcement officers responded. “Oftentimes the person is socially isolated and not socially successful, and that creates a situation in which you are on your own and it’s hard to get others to buy into your vision or anger”. In fact, not a single week has gone by without a mass shooting.
Advertisement
“They really cut across the spectrum of political and religious ideologies and other grievances”, Simon said. “And the line between them sometimes is very blurred”.
