Marc Follman on the rise in public mass shootings: -Erika Its not a matter of if, but when and where the next mass shooting will happen: It might take place at another shopping mall, or college campus, or suburban office building, and probably not long from now. Yet, as these disturbing incidents keep appearing in the headlines, various commentators have argued that mass shootings are not on the rise. That may be true if you look at all mass shootings, including gang killings and in-home violence stemming from domestic abuse. But new research from the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrates that mass shootings in public have become far more frequent. The Harvard findings are also corroborated by a separate report issued recently by the FBI. After a heavily armed young man gunned down 12 people and wounded 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012, my colleagues at Mother Jones and I began examining how often mass shootings in public places occurred. Finding no reliable answer, we set about gathering three decades of data. We discovered that such shootings were on the rise—even before the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary, the Washington Navy Yard, Ft. Hood, and near UC Santa Barbara. Though mass shootings make an outsized psychological impact, they are a tiny fraction of the nations overall gun violence, which takes more than 30,000 lives annually. Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 21:30:00 +0000
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