Mass Shooting Becoming More Rampant And Alarming, Analysis Shows

Another mass shooting occurred last July 4 and it appears the frequency of such has been rising.

The latest incident took the lives of seven people while also injuring about a dozen others. It was another unfortunate incident, coming not long after school children were killed in Uvalde, Texas and also the Black Shoppers in Buffalo, New York.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that mass shootings are becoming more frequent, something that is being backed by a data analysis called the Marshall Project.

The number of mass shootings has been rising in the past years, accounting for the high death tolls. However, mass shootings account for only a fraction of firearm-related deaths in the United States where about 124 people die daily in acts of gun violence.

The analysis being done is based on the Violence Project. It is a non-profit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the congressional research service, which advises federal lawmakers.

Thirty-one of the massacres reportedly happened from 2017 to 2021, a higher number compared to the 24 from 2012 to 2016.

By comparing the trends over the five years. In 2020, the numbers dipped although this was attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. But before that, there was that incident in 2017 which left 58 people dead.

In all, the last five years have seen more mass shooting compared to other periods that dates back to 1966.

Under the Violence Project, a mass shooting is defined as a single incident in which four or more people are killed (not including the shooter), in public locations, such as schools, stores, or workplaces.

This excludes murders that occur because of domestic violence, or in the course of another crime, such as armed robbery or gang violence.

The mass shooting that happened on July 4 was the fourth in fewer than three months. In all four, the gunmen used high-powered weapons, law enforcement authorities said.

Although US President Joe Biden signed a gun safety measure in decades, it did not include the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

The lack of consensus on what qualifies as a mass shooting makes the problem confusing to talk about, let alone try to address, according to Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at the school of public and international affairs at Princeton University.