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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:41PM   Printer-friendly

A new, government-backed study [PDF] answers a question that has been on the minds of some Americans amid this summer's headlines from Charleston, Chattanooga, and Lafayette. According to the research, mass public shootings are indeed occurring more frequently than ever before in the United States.

The findings, published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) last week, show that the average rate of mass public shootings has increased from one incident per year in the 1970s to 4.5 incidents per year from 2010 through 2013. The numbers corroborate a 2014 report from Mother Jones. Scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University independently analyzed data that Mother Jones had collected, and the results showed a marked rise in the frequency of mass shootings in the last three decades. Notwithstanding the recent cluster of high-profile incidents, the CRS report also finds that over the past 14 years, the rate of increase has tapered off.

http://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/mass-shootings-congressional-report/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:18PM (#218745)

    However it does mirror the growth in various prescription psych drugs, its pretty unusual to have a mass shooting where the shooter wasn't on some anti-depressant or another med.

    You've got cause and effect reversed. Since nearly all mass shootings are suicide attempts it should be no surprise that the shooters were depressed enough to be medicated. When 10% of the adult population has been prescribed anti-depressants, the fact that a pool of a couple of hundred suicidally depressed people are in that group of ~25 million taking anti-depressants is not particularly remarkable.

    its just that the other side of the coin is maybe 1 in ten million will have an "adverse reaction" and shoot everyone in a church once in awhile.

    There is a presumption of causation in there that is unexamined, as in correlation is not causation. At a minimum the level of correlation is statistical noise. Comparisons with adverse reactions to vaccines is unwarranted since the mechanism for those reactions is a pretty straightforward application of medical science.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @02:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @02:06AM (#219362)

    You've got cause and effect reversed.

    Being on antidepressants is the cause, there's no mix-up. Depressed people may plan suicides, but they rarely act out on them. Putting them on antidepressants makes them motivated to actually go through with them. This is a pretty well-known effect [nbcnews.com] that has been known for quite some time.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @04:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @04:15AM (#219418)

      Depressed people may plan suicides, but they rarely act out on them. Putting them on antidepressants makes them motivated to actually go through with them.

      Apparently you don't realize this, but you linked to an article that supports the exact opposite of your claims.

      From the linked article:
      (1) A 31% drop in anti-depressant usage produced a 22-34% increase in suicide attempts.
      (2) Clinical data showed anti-depressants increasing suicidal thinking in 1% of users (no mention of p-values), but nothing about an increase in acting on those thoughts.