The Mass Shootings You See on the News Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg of U.S. Gun Deaths
After a pandemic respite, grueling mass shootings have returned as a sad mainstay of U.S. news. In late May, a string of brutal attacks started in the United States, with formerly innocuous places like Buffalo’s Tops Friendly Market, the Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Okla., small town Uvalde, Texas, and Chicago suburb Highland Park now forever connected in the minds of Americans with senseless carnage.
Data collected by Mother Jones shows that 51 people have this year died in mass shootings with at least three victims carried out by “lone shooters in public settings over short periods of time”. The definition seems tedious but more or less overlaps with those mass shootings we all hear about on the news. Those attacks that happen quickly, in public places and to uninvolved bystanders are understandably those which create the most fear and anger. They are, however, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to U.S. mass shootings and gun deaths in general.
Public lone-shooter incidents decreased significantly in the pandemic but at around six months into 2022 already rose to seven incidents — an above-average first half of the year. 2017, 2018 and 2019 also saw especially high numbers of this type of mass shooting. The 2017 tally includes 58 killed at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, while 2016 deaths include the 49 lives lost at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Expanding the definition of mass shooting to all incidents with three or more victims regardless of circumstance shows that these “other”, less publicized mass shooting are actually far more common and also did not take a pandemic break.
Gun Violence Archive has counted 28 mass shootings as of July 5, 2022, suggesting that few incidents of mass gun violence receive much public attention. In 2021, a record 77 were recorded.
Even avid news readers have probably not heard about a shooting in Biloxi, Miss., on April 27 that according to local news outlet WLOX started as an argument between hotel staff and guests and left five dead including the shooter and a person he carjacked. They also likely didn’t read about the February 5 incident in which a gunman shot seven and ended the life of five of his family members in Corsicana, Texas, before killing himself. The only coverage in non-local news came out of Canada and the UK. A January 23 sextuple homicide in Milwaukee did eventually appear on national news. One man was arrested for what court documents allegedly call a botched drug robbery. A second shooter may still be at large.
Underserved and underreported
Especially in rural communities or communities of color, non-public mass shootings are woefully underreported, like a June 7 quadruple homicide in a Portsmouth, Va., home, of which few details have come to light.
While the number of mass shootings fluctuates every year, the overall number of firearm homicides in the U.S. has taken a worrying upwards turn recently. Between 2019 and 2020 — the latest year on record with the CDC— they increased by 35 percent for reasons experts are still trying to understand. Gun homicide numbers for 2021 have not been released yet, but murders overall stayed as elevated as they had been in 2020. As almost 80 percent of murders in the U.S. are gun deaths, it is highly likely that gun homicide numbers will not have decreased again in 2021.
With these figures, the United States leads the developed world in violent gun deaths by a large margin, as seen in data by the Small Arms Survey. Looking at absolute figures, the U.S. experienced around 12,300 gun homicides in 2018, while the five largest European nations — Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain — saw a bafflingly low 702 despite population numbers about matching up. Even when considering that only 20 percent of murders in the EU are by firearm, overall homicide numbers still remained considerably lower than in the United States.
In the developing world, gun homicide numbers are sometimes, but not always, higher than in the U.S. as shown by the examples of Brazil (46,700 gun murders in 2018 at a 209 million population) and Pakistan (2,800 gun murders at a 212 million population).
In 2020, the number of U.S. gun homicides climbed as high as 19,383. But even this number is once again overshadowed by an even grimmer statistic. The largest number of gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides — numbering 24,292 in 2020 according to the CDC Wonder database. While many homicides and a big chunk of mass shootings are already underreported, gun suicides that are seldom discussed even in private add yet another sad dimension to the unseen gun death epidemic of the United States.
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