Former President Barack Obama said in 2015 regarding mass public shootings that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”
“When it comes to gun massacres, the United States is tragically exceptional: There are more public mass shootings in the United States than in any other country in the world,” reported CNN last October.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, after the Florida Valentine’s Day shooting, said the following: “This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America.”
Are they right? If you take population into account, no.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,
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 cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because it was the beginning of the Obama administration and it matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). A comparison across the entire world is available here.
Some people have defended President Obama’s statement by pointing to the word “frequency.” But, even if one puts it in terms of frequency, the president’s statement is still false, with the US ranking 12th compared to European countries.
In total, there were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in E.U. than the U.S. from 2009-15.
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