It feels like we are hearing about mass shootings way too often these days. Of course there was the horrible tragedy in Paris, and other countries are hit by terrorist attacks and mass murderers, but according to a recent study, the United States leads the world in mass shootings, which is definitely not something we want to be leading in. Mass shootings are defined for the study as having four or more victims and don’t include gang killings or slayings that involve the death of multiple family members. Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States. If the definition itself does not include gang killings or the death of multiple family members, you can only imagine how many more there were. Naturally, people would ask the question: why are there so many more mass shootings in the US compared to anywhere else around the world?
One of the reasons is that in the United States, people have a greater chance of dying in mass shootings if they’re at work or at school. Overseas, these incidents typically happen near military installations, where clearly many less people are. Another reason is in more than half the American cases, the shooter had more than one firearm. In global incidents, the shooter typically had only one gun. You clearly get much more of an effect when you are heavily loaded with firearms and a supply to keep shooting. Although there are many more shootings in the United States, there are 6.87 victims on average per incident. In the other 171 countries Lankford studied, the average was 8.8 victims per incident. People have found that the reason for this is because the police are well trained here and are aware of how to handle, and stop, situations before they are able to go much further. In other countries, however, the police forces are much slower and unable to react in a timely manner to save more lives.
The fact that the United States has more guns than any other country in the world is definitely another factor that increases mass shootings. There are an estimated 270 million to 310 million firearms in circulation in the United States. With the American population at 318.9 million, that breaks down to nearly one firearm for every American…that’s a scary thought. I think with numbers like that, it’s time that the United States makes it a little harder to any average person to get and possess a gun because clearly people are using them for the wrong reasons. To protect the United States, and the people in it, I think the restrictive gun laws should only continue to get stronger from here.
I had just saw something the other day about how mass shootings happened in the United States much more frequently than other countries and I thought why is that? But I could not really think of an answer at the time. It is really unfortunate how many shootings have taken place over the last several years and something does need to be done to stop it but restricting access to guns might not be how to do it. I’m not sure why there’s been so many in the last five or so years but I don’t think it’s because of anything different about guns since around the turn of the century. Limiting access to guns or outlawing them will not stop people that want to get them from acquiring them somehow. This is a tough issue and I’m not really sure why it’s happening more often recently or what should be done to prevent it.
I found this blog to be very interesting and informative, especially what with all the violence and mass shootings happening around the world in the present time! This post also led me to wonder about the person behind the gun during mass shootings. While I am definitely no advocate for gun possession, I believe the people who carry out such crimes are a particular type of person, as in many suffer from mental illnesses and so on. Therefore since it would be hard to completely get rid of the ownership of guns, so rather an alternative should be a longer process involving very strict background screenings. You can read about who exactly commits a mass shooting here!
I found this blog to be very interest, since I am from California and a mass shooting just happened in San Bernadino, it really hit me how frequent mass shooting happen in America. I found this great website that really informs people about mass shootingsv . After I read it I realized how often these things happen, and It is not alright for it to keep going on. There is information I feel people aren’t aware of with mass shootings, like more than 50% of mass shootings are family related. about 57% of the victims of mass shootings knew their killer even if they weren’t the main target. These stats really hit me because over half of these mass shooting are people killing people close to them. It makes me wonder that there must be something in their heads that definitely should not allow them to have a gun. I think this is all evidence that America needs to be stricter on their gun control, and it shouldn’t be alright that just anyone can have a fire arm if they want. Society needs to come together and make a change before more innocent people die.
Good post! I agree that the amount of guns in the US might contribute to mass shootings. It’s like anyone can get a gun here and it has really bad outcome. You can read an article about gun owners’ mentality here.