Responding to the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday – the deadliest since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre three years ago – President Obama warned Americans that “we should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events”.
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One common definition of a mass shooting is when four or more people are killed or injured (and that’s what we’re using for the purposes of this article).
Gun violence overall: Even mass shootings that do command national attention only account for a sliver of the deaths from gun violence that occur each day in America. So far this week, five people were wounded in a Sunday morning shooting in Kankakee, Ill., and another shooting Wednesday, before the San Bernardino attack, left one woman dead and three men injured in Savannah, Ga.
Through the same time period past year there were 301 mass shootings, according to Shooting Tracker. 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.
“It’s really shameful that Congress has refused to do anything on gun violence prevention in light of the horrific shootings we keep having in this country, and the fact that the public overwhelmingly wants Congress to do something about this”, said Juliet Leftwich, legal director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in a recent interview with NBC Bay Area.
As reports streamed in on Wednesday that a mass shooting had taken place in San Bernardino, California an exasperated nation recoiled in a mixture of horror and dismay.
While the numbers oscillate from year to year, there has been no discernible trend either in the numbers or in the characteristics of the shooters, said Fox, who is also a co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.
“The only increase has been in fear, and in the perception of an increase”, he said. 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 country has had very few mass shootings since these changes were implemented in 1996, and the changes also contribute to a decline in the firearm homicide rate by 59 percent and a decline in the firearm suicide rate by 65 percent, with no corresponding non-firearm increases in either.
The small ones… well, they have become just another police report in the United States.
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We still have a month to go.
