NYTimes.com: Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns.

[John Clark]

Check out this article from The New York Times. Because I'm a subscriber, you can read it through this gift link without a subscription.

Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns.

Americans advance a lot of theories for why they have so many more gun deaths than other countries do. The answer is lying in plain sight.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iaha3HMDm4diPsSGYyMvE7IaLBibNIomDGSX8QEK78oQ-BzyOBEelF2Dgiuvpaenp0ZIiIzoIb1Xn8z29iFe4EExgLQTzvzLvZjlvr4tgiaMTO0DLqP0XJ1d10x8Y9kdlurxXAPxfraG-dw3M1_2_52VMguRD4GNCSarrK_XUUFTdaCaBHe6AEwU_gIGm2A2I7BtM9TNVlaGlnET3hg4Goj69I6ONMfPqb3KxFIa9OpyPxKSTQudNH1csV3E4vElLxqsqrPrgiMzqe1z_Y3HKZTu9DUo1nMlbsTllrmQnQ4qmR6lGM&smid=em-share

[Brent Meeker]

Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.

But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

If I understand that correctly, mass shootings in the US are "routine" because it's much bigger than Switzerland and Finland (total 14 million) so they're counting over a much bigger nation (335 million).  So the skeptics have a point.  I also wonder why the comparison is just to Switzerland and Finland...cherry picking?  There also seems to be quite a bit of variation in how mass shootings are counted.

Average (Mean) Annual Death Rate per Million People from Mass Public Shootings (U.S., Canada, and Europe, 2009-2015):
Norway — 1.888
Serbia — 0.381
France — 0.347
Macedonia — 0.337
Albania — 0.206
Slovakia — 0.185
Switzerland — 0.142
Finland — 0.132
Belgium — 0.128
Czech Republic — 0.123
United States — 0.089
Austria — 0.068
Netherlands — 0.051
Canada — 0.032
England — 0.027
Germany — 0.023
Russia — 0.012
Italy — 0.009
In addition, a 2018 CRPC study ranked the U.S. at number sixty-four in the world in terms of mass shooting rates per capita.

However, read the analysis at https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shootings-by-country which critiques the above and suggests a different statistic

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People from Mass Public Shootings (U.S., Canada, and Europe, 2009-2015):
United States — 0.058
Albania — 0
Austria — 0
Belgium — 0
Czech Republic — 0
Finland — 0
France — 0
Germany — 0
Italy — 0
Macedonia — 0
Netherlands — 0
Norway — 0
Russia — 0
Serbia — 0
Slovakia — 0
Switzerland — 0
United Kingdom — 0

That 0 as a median is a little confusing.  It just means that for more than half the years the number was zero.  It would make more sense to score the mean-time-between-mass-shootings as the statistic or it's inverse the rate of mass shootings.

Brent