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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/
(Score: 2) by GoonDu on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:19AM
Not an american here so I do not know the mass media's take on mass shooting but this article (http://ithp.org/articles/mediacopycatshootings.html) presents an alternate theory that mass media's obsessive coverage on mass shooting could be a factor as well. Perhaps studies should be made to see this effect. It is pretty hard to quantify such data though considering the number of news station in America. Simply using the hours of coverage for each shooting and see whether they are on the rise shows nothing.