20 kids from Connecticut are not high school juniors today. They’re not getting their driver’s licenses, or dating, or planning for college. 10 years since 26 people were slaughtered and we haven’t done shit.
If anything, it’s getting worse.
In October 2018, PLOS One published a study analyzing 100 mass shootings from the Mother Jones database that occurred from January 1982 to May 2018 that used non-homogeneous Poisson regression models on the biannual and annual incidence of mass shootings in the United States to evaluate whether mass shootings became more common in the United States over the preceding three decades that found that mass shootings had steadily increased (with the biannual incidence model having a better goodness of fit value based upon Akaike information criterion than the annual incidence model).[44]
It’s the guns.
Higher accessibility and ownership of guns has been cited as a reason for the U.S.'s high rate of mass shootings.[5][12][54] The US has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people; the second highest is Yemen with 52.8 firearms per 100 people.[54]
A study published in PLOS One in 2015 examined mass shootings in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 (and school shootings in the U.S. from 1998 to 2013). The study authors found that the "state prevalence of firearm ownership is significantly associated with the state incidence of mass killings with firearms, school shootings, and mass shootings."[55]
[...]
A 2019 study published in The BMJ conducted a cross-sectional time series study of U.S. states from 1998 to 2015; the study found that "States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states."[56] The study specifically found that "A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings. Partially adjusted regression analyses produced similar results, as did analyses restricted to domestic and non-domestic mass shootings."[56]
A 2020 study published in Law and Human Behavior examined the relationship of state guns laws and the incidence and lethality of mass shootings in the U.S. from 1976 to 2018.The study found that "laws requiring permits to purchase a gun are associated with a lower incidence of mass public shootings, and bans on large capacity magazines are associated with fewer fatalities and nonfatal injuries when such events do occur."[57] The study specifically found that large-capacity magazine bans were associated with approximately 38% fewer fatalities and 77% fewer nonfatal injuries when a mass shooting occurred.[57]
But we knew that. We just don’t seem to care.
A 2020 study published in the American Political Science Review using data on school shootings from 2006 to 2018 concluded the incidents had "little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States,"[98] whereas a 2021 study in the same journal covering a broader time period (1980–2016) found that the vote share of the Democratic Party increased by an average of almost 5 percentage points in counties that had experienced a "rampage-style" school shooting.[99] Both studies found no increase in voter turnout.[98][99]
A 2021 study published in PNAS concluded that "mass shootings have a strong impact on the emotions of individuals, but the impact is politicized, limited to individuals living within the town or city where the incident occurs, and fades within a week of the incident."[100] The study authors suggested that this phenomenon could help explain why mass shootings in the U.S. have not led to meaningful policy reform efforts.[100]
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