another day, another mass shooting

SatchelSF
Tue, 28 Aug 2018 16:45:52 +0000

Just to add a few more stats to the discussion of just how big a problem mass killings are in the United States, the WaPo recently did a pretty good compilation of killings since 1966. It is not perfectly applicable here, because the paper included only incidents in which 4 or more people were killed by 1 or 2 shooters, so it would not pick up an incident like this in which only 2 were killed. Nevertheless, it is instructive for people who are not used to looking at numbers or thinking about things like recency bias or availability heuristics.

Over the last 52 years, 1966-present, 1182 people in total were killed in a mass killing in the United States. This is approximately 21 people per year. On a per capita basis (using a rough-weighted 270M population figure over the entire period), that is an annual rate of 0.008 killings per 100,000.

Just for comparison, the current annual per capita rate in probably the safest big city in the US, NYC, is approximately 3.397 killings per 100,000. In other words, being killed while walking on the streets of NYC is approximately 435 times more likely than being killed in a mass killing. Walking the streets of Chicago implies a figure of approximately 2720 times more likely.