(Trends Wide) — At least 10 people were killed and 10 others injured after a mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, on Saturday night, which occurred as the city’s large Asian-American community celebrated Lunar New Year weekend.
Until now, much of what happened remains unknown, but the scenes of agony and horror are increasingly familiar in America. In fact, this Saturday’s mass shooting joins a staggering 32 other shootings in the first three weeks of 2023 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling as others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.
“A moment of cultural celebration…and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand that this violence must stop.”
But how that plays out with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.
Sobering facts about mass shootings
The number of shootings is bad no matter how you look at it.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people under the age of 24 in the United States, according to a study published in the December 2022 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2015 to 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under the age of 18 in the country, according to an Everytown report. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.
An uneven load. A study published late last year in JAMA Network Open looked at gun deaths over the past three decades: a total of more than 1 million lives have been lost to gun violence since 1990.
The researchers found that firearm death rates increased for most demographic groups in recent years, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, but large disparities persisted. The homicide rate among black youth (142 homicide deaths per 100,000 black men ages 20-24) was nearly 10 times higher than the overall rate of US firearm deaths in 2021.
Americans are armed like few others. There are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the US, according to an estimate by the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based organization. That’s 120 guns for every 100 Americans.
While the exact number of firearms owned by civilians is difficult to estimate due to a variety of factors, including unregistered guns, illegal trade, and global conflicts, no other country has more civilian guns than people.
About 45% of American adults say they live in a household with a gun, according to an October 2022 Gallup poll.
How should we define “mass shooting”?
The Gun Violence Archive, like Trends Wide, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.
But what defines a mass shooting depends on who you ask.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, cited 2012 legislation that defines a “mass murder” as “three or more murders in a single incident.”
Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowdsourced database, defines a mass shooting as “a single outbreak of violence in which four or more people are shot.”
Everytown For Gun Safety defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are shot to death, excluding the shooter.
The lack of a firm definition does not help to address the problem. And the lack of it opens up space to interpret the data differently. The conservative Daily Caller, for example, has cited a definition of “public mass shootings” included in a 2013 Congressional Research Service report that is so narrow that it only identified 78 of them between 1983 and 2012.
A 2019 research article published in Injury Epidemiology highlighted this issue: “The Archive of Gun Violence recorded the most mass shooting incidents with 346 incidents in 2017, while Mother Jones only recorded 11 cases.”
The authors’ conclusion? “Establishing a definition of ‘mass shooting’ will improve the quality of the analyzes that are being completed. This could lead to improved not only public awareness and understanding of the facts of mass shootings, but also arguments for lawmakers in favor of legislation that could ease the burden that mass shootings place on society.”
Remember we are alone
It certainly doesn’t have to be that way. Countries that have introduced laws to reduce gun-related deaths have made significant changes, a previous in-depth analysis by Trends Wide found:
Australia. Less than two weeks after Australia’s worst mass shooting, the federal government implemented a new program, banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns, and unifying gun owners’ licenses and registrations across the country. In the following 10 years, deaths by firearms in Australia fell by more than 50%.
A 2010 study found that the 1997 government buyback program, part of the overall reform, led to an average drop in firearm suicide rates of 74% over the following five years.
South Africa. Gun-related deaths nearly halved over a 10-year period after new gun legislation, the Firearms Control Act of 2000, went into effect in July 2004. The new laws made it much more difficult to plus obtaining a firearm.
New Zealand. Gun laws were swiftly changed after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Just 24 hours after the attack, which killed 51 people, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the law would be changed.
New Zealand’s parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country’s gun laws less than a month later, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
Britain it tightened its gun laws and banned private gun ownership after a 1996 mass shooting, a move that saw gun deaths drop by nearly a quarter in a decade.
But America’s gun culture is a global outlier. For now, the deadly cycle of violence seems destined to continue.
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(Trends Wide) — At least 10 people were killed and 10 others injured after a mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, on Saturday night, which occurred as the city’s large Asian-American community celebrated Lunar New Year weekend.
Until now, much of what happened remains unknown, but the scenes of agony and horror are increasingly familiar in America. In fact, this Saturday’s mass shooting joins a staggering 32 other shootings in the first three weeks of 2023 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling as others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.
“A moment of cultural celebration…and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand that this violence must stop.”
But how that plays out with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.
Sobering facts about mass shootings
The number of shootings is bad no matter how you look at it.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people under the age of 24 in the United States, according to a study published in the December 2022 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2015 to 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under the age of 18 in the country, according to an Everytown report. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.
An uneven load. A study published late last year in JAMA Network Open looked at gun deaths over the past three decades: a total of more than 1 million lives have been lost to gun violence since 1990.
The researchers found that firearm death rates increased for most demographic groups in recent years, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, but large disparities persisted. The homicide rate among black youth (142 homicide deaths per 100,000 black men ages 20-24) was nearly 10 times higher than the overall rate of US firearm deaths in 2021.
Americans are armed like few others. There are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the US, according to an estimate by the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based organization. That’s 120 guns for every 100 Americans.
While the exact number of firearms owned by civilians is difficult to estimate due to a variety of factors, including unregistered guns, illegal trade, and global conflicts, no other country has more civilian guns than people.
About 45% of American adults say they live in a household with a gun, according to an October 2022 Gallup poll.
How should we define “mass shooting”?
The Gun Violence Archive, like Trends Wide, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.
But what defines a mass shooting depends on who you ask.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, cited 2012 legislation that defines a “mass murder” as “three or more murders in a single incident.”
Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowdsourced database, defines a mass shooting as “a single outbreak of violence in which four or more people are shot.”
Everytown For Gun Safety defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are shot to death, excluding the shooter.
The lack of a firm definition does not help to address the problem. And the lack of it opens up space to interpret the data differently. The conservative Daily Caller, for example, has cited a definition of “public mass shootings” included in a 2013 Congressional Research Service report that is so narrow that it only identified 78 of them between 1983 and 2012.
A 2019 research article published in Injury Epidemiology highlighted this issue: “The Archive of Gun Violence recorded the most mass shooting incidents with 346 incidents in 2017, while Mother Jones only recorded 11 cases.”
The authors’ conclusion? “Establishing a definition of ‘mass shooting’ will improve the quality of the analyzes that are being completed. This could lead to improved not only public awareness and understanding of the facts of mass shootings, but also arguments for lawmakers in favor of legislation that could ease the burden that mass shootings place on society.”
Remember we are alone
It certainly doesn’t have to be that way. Countries that have introduced laws to reduce gun-related deaths have made significant changes, a previous in-depth analysis by Trends Wide found:
Australia. Less than two weeks after Australia’s worst mass shooting, the federal government implemented a new program, banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns, and unifying gun owners’ licenses and registrations across the country. In the following 10 years, deaths by firearms in Australia fell by more than 50%.
A 2010 study found that the 1997 government buyback program, part of the overall reform, led to an average drop in firearm suicide rates of 74% over the following five years.
South Africa. Gun-related deaths nearly halved over a 10-year period after new gun legislation, the Firearms Control Act of 2000, went into effect in July 2004. The new laws made it much more difficult to plus obtaining a firearm.
New Zealand. Gun laws were swiftly changed after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Just 24 hours after the attack, which killed 51 people, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the law would be changed.
New Zealand’s parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country’s gun laws less than a month later, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
Britain it tightened its gun laws and banned private gun ownership after a 1996 mass shooting, a move that saw gun deaths drop by nearly a quarter in a decade.
But America’s gun culture is a global outlier. For now, the deadly cycle of violence seems destined to continue.
