On Oct. 1 this year, when eight students and an assistant professor were fatally shot by a disturbed student at Umpqua Community College in OR, the Washington Post noted 274 days had passed in the year, up until that point – and already – there had been 294 mass shootings in the United States. Nonetheless, they give an indication of the widespread nature of shootings that leave four or more people dead or injured. The shooting in San Bernardino was the second such incident Wednesday, after a woman was killed and three men were injured in an incident in Savannah, Ga. The vast majority of gun deaths are not mass shootings, which account for well under 5 percent of all shooting deaths.
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An unknown number of people were wounded in that episode, which culminated with the shooter committing suicide.
The most complete (and least confusing) data set, according to Fox, is kept by the Congressional Research Service, which released a report on mass shootings in July. “If you’re one of the victims of a mass killing, it doesn’t matter if a person kills you is a brother or a stranger; you’re just as dead”, Fox said. The report found an average of 22.4 mass shootings a year from 2009 to 2013, compared with 20.2 shooting in the previous five years.
But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said his research showed the number of such shootings has roughly held steady in recent decades.
Looking at data on mass shootings, it shouldn’t be that surprising that these two events happened so close together.
One common definition of a mass shooting is “four or more people killed or injured without a cooling off period”. “In the ’70s and ’80s, we didn’t hear about it on the Internet – because there was no Internet – and we didn’t have cable news channels that would devote 24 hours of coverage”.
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In contrast to more recent mass shootings, the one that took place in San Bernardino is the first since Columbine to involve more than one of these types of shooters and, perhaps more surprisingly, the first to have involved a female shooter.
