UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Eur

[mountaineer]

Article is from 2015, but since we frequently hear the argument that mass shootings occur only in the USA, so it must be the fault of the Second Amendment and our violent culture, I thought the information might be helpful.

UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe
23 Jun , 2015

1) In his address to the nation after the Planned Parenthood attack, Obama claimed:  “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

Senator Harry Reid made a similar statement on June 23rd: “The United States is the only advanced country where this type of mass violence occurs.  Let’s do something. We can expand, for example, background checks. … We should support not giving guns to people who are mentally ill and felons.”

We prefer not to make purely cross-sectional comparisons, but this claim is simply not true.  The data below looks at the period of time from the beginning of the Obama administration in January 2009 until the end of 2015.  Mass public shootings – defined as four or more people killed in a public place, and not in the course of committing another crime, and not involving struggles over sovereignty.  The focus on excluding shootings that do not involve other crimes (e.g., gang fights or robberies) has been used from the original research by Lott and Landes to more recently the FBI.  We cover the period from the beginning of the Obama administration to the current date, from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked).  ...



The average incident rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with a 95% confidence Interval of .0257 to .09477. The US rate is 0.078 is higher than the EU rate, but US and the average for EU countries are not statistically different. The average fatality rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.114 with a 95% confidence Interval of -.0244 to .253. The US rate is 0.089 is lower than the EU rate, but they are again not statistically significantly different.

There were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15 ...

Read the entire report at Crime Research.org