Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows

By Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Mille
US News • Views: 37,506

Another epidemic worse than Ebola.

Also — claims in the media that mass shootings aren’t increasing are wrong.

Check out this horrifying Harvard timeline graphic:

Have mass shootings become more common?

According to our statistical analysis of more than three decades of data, in 2011 the United States entered a new period in which mass shootings are occurring more frequently. Our analysis used data compiled by Mother Jones on attacks that took place in public, in which the shooter and the victims generally were unrelated and unknown to each other, and in which the shooter murdered four or more people. (An incident with four or more homicide victims was the threshold count for mass killing established by the FBI a decade ago; a federal law signed by President Obama in 2013 defined the threshold as three or more victims killed.)

So why do we keep hearing in the media that mass shootings have not increased?

This view stems from the work of Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who has long maintained that mass shootings are a stable phenomenon. (“The growing menace lies more in our fears than in the facts,” he has said.) But Fox’s oft-cited claim is based on a misguided approach to studying the problem: The data he uses includes all homicides in which four or more people were murdered with a gun. His analysis, which counts the number of events per year, lumps together mass shootings in public places with a far more numerous set of mass murders that are contextually distinct—a majority of which stem from domestic violence and occur in private homes. Fox’s annual count and use of overly broad data including many types of mass killings fail to detect the recent shift in public mass shootings.

More: Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows

Jump to top

Create a PageThis is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.
Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.
Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
LGF User's Guide RSS Feeds

Help support Little Green Footballs!

Subscribe now for ad-free access!Register and sign in to a free LGF account before subscribing, and your ad-free access will be automatically enabled.

Donate with
PayPal
Cash.app
Recent PagesClick to refresh