One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting, a new study shows, revealing the depth and impact of the epidemic of gun violence that has washed over the US in recent decades.
The study found that about 7% of US adults have been present at the scene of a mass shooting in their lifetime, and more than 2% have been injured during one, according to new a report from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Since 2014, there have been nearly 5,000 mass shootings documented nationwide, with more than 500 occurring annually since 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
What a load of horseshit.
No way in hell. I’m a gun nut, in the South. I’ve worked long hours in South Chicago. Never seen a gun fired in anger. Hell, I’ve hardly ever seen a gun in public that wasn’t on a cop. Of all the people I’ve met in my 54-years walking the Earth, I know exactly one who was shot, and he was asking for it, begging for it.
Oh FFS. So 1-in-50 Americans have been hurt? In a “mass shooting” no less?!
And let’s define mass shooting. Note the numbers from Mother Jones, not exactly a conservative rag now are they? Fine, for argument’s sake let’s go with the most broad definition. I’m not sure it’s possible to cram that many witnesses (7% of 330,00,000 Americans = 23,100,100 witnesses) around those shootings, even spread over decades.
So what were the questions in this scientific poll?
Likely people answering, “Yes, I’ve heard gunfire, I think, maybe.”
Oh my fuck me with this BS. What’s sad is that people, particularly non-Americans, will read the headline, believe it, and move on without a single question.
Here’s the study, if you bother to click two links deep from this posted article.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132
They define a mass shooting as 4+ people struck with a bullet.
2% of people report being injured because being trampled in a stampede or struck from a ricochet or bullet fragment counts as an injury.
Stampede and ‘crowd-squeeze’ / ‘crowd-crush’ injuries are quite common in densely crowded areas where a shooting, or fire, or something incites a general panic and rush to flee, and can cause as much or more deaths and injuries in very dense crowds than the actual immediate danger being fleed from.
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Maybe actually read the methodology before constructing a strawman version of it and then tearing that down because your personal experience doesn’t match broader data.
Your caricatured criticism of how they obtained the data, how they structured the survey, is completely baseless and innacurate.
You say you’re 54, so by the study’s definition, you are Gen X, and are thus about twice as likely to have never been present for a mass shooting as a Millenial, about three times as likely to have never been present at a mass shooting as Gen Z.
See Table 3.
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You’re doing the stereotypical boomer thing, making up baseless nonsense critiques and assuming everyone involved is comically incompetent to justify your gut reaction.
The reason surveys are done is because you can’t actually have any idea about broad social patterns when your only actual data point is the anecdote of your single life and its experiences.
What’s actually sad is how confident you are in your own baseless, made up strawman criticisms and personal incredulity.
If you think your criticisms have merit, I look forward to your own academically published paper taking down the specific methodological flaws you seem to think exist in a paper written by 3 PhDs in the fields of Sociology and Criminology, who are well trained in statistics and survey methodology.
Untill then, I’ll be laughing at the horseshit level critique you’ve thus far presented.
Exactly. I’m in my mid 30’s and know several people who have witnessed mass shootings. I have personally been under active shooter lockdowns multiple times. Hell, my former roommate was shot in the ass by one at a music festival. This person saw “7% have witnessed an active shooting” and immediately called bullshit, because they’re part of the other 93% and are incapable of imagining anything outside of their (extremely narrow) lived experience. And that’s some real boomer attitude.
I think you’re relying too heavily on your anecdotal experience here. Maybe you’ve never seen a gun fired in anger, but there are about 13,000 gun homicides per year.
Plus, the nature of gatherings mean that a very small number of events can have many witnesses, especially if defined to include people who heard gunshots.
Take the most extreme example, the 2017 Vegas shooting, the single worst mass shooting event in American history. There were people killed and injured in the event. Under anyone’s definition that was a mass shooting.
There were 22,000 attendees at that music festival. How many staff, crew, contractors, vendors, performance artists and their own staffs? How many cops and first responders were there? How many were in the 3200-room hotel and casino who had to be evacuated during the response? How many people heard gunshots in the open air, or saw muzzle flashes from the hotel room? 50,000?
Same with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Lots of people were within hearing range of the shots.
These types of events have a lot of people present. If 4 people are dying from a shooting, what’s the average number of people wounded? How many are present?
The math is somewhat counterintuitive, and can explain a lot of the high number.
Last time I discussed this matter on reddit, before I deleted all my comments and left, the person I was arguing with said something like: