The Problem

Following mass public shootings in California and Oregon in the spring of 2014, President Obama declared that such incidents were becoming “the norm.” To be sure, the number of mass public shootings in the United States has increased significantly since 2011. According to Harvard researchers who compiled statistics for Mother Jones magazine, the number of mass public shootings in the U.S. tripled from 2011 to 2014, occurring on average every 64 days; in contrast, from 1982 to 2010, a mass public shooting occurred on average every 200 days. And 2011-2015 marked the period of deadliest mass public shootings in terms of number of people killed and injured, including 20 first graders who were among the 27 people killed during the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. The U.S. leads the world in the number of mass public shootings with 31 percent (90) of the 292 known mass public shootings that took place in 171 countries between 1966 and 2012. Such violent episodes, as horrific as they are, may be the least of our problems when it comes to gun violence, since according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), they account for less than 2 percent of total gun deaths in the U.S. each year and less than 1 percent of child gun deaths in this country. Who, then, is most at risk for gun violence perpetration and victimization? And what policy changes may be most effective in reducing gun violence in the U.S.? In this chapter, we review the empirical data that provide answers to these questions.

Research Evidence

It is important to keep in mind that estimates of gun violence may vary depending on how it is defined. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has historically defined a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more individuals are killed. In 2013, President Obama lowered the threshold to three or more homicide victims. Nevertheless, such a narrow definition excludes shootings in which fewer than three people are killed, but many are injured. In contrast, Everytown for Gun Safety (www.everytown.org), a social activist group, uses a broad definition that includes incidents in which no one is injured, resulting in a substantially higher number of mass shootings than appears in federal statistics.