Good grief not you too nivek, surely your not in the same boat as CB, it was a throw away comment, to illustrate a point. However if you insist I justify it...
Mass shootings in America are a serious problem -- and these charts show just why - CNN
If you go with the raw numbers ...
According to the
Gun Violence Archive, which compiles data from shooting incidents, a "mass shooting" is any incident in which a gunman ...
- shoots or kills four or more people
- in the same general time and location
By that definition, according to the Gun Violence Archive, we have seen
273 mass shootings from
January 1 to October 3.
That averages to 7.5 mass shootings a week.
Under the narrowest definition ...
The government has never defined "mass shooting" as a standalone category. Let's go with
the most commonly accepted definition, from
the Congressional Research Service: a shooting in which a gunman ...
- kills four or more people
- selects victims randomly (ruling out gang killings or the killing of multiple family members)
- attacks in a public place
That definition rules out the
Congressional baseball practice shooting in June, because the gunman didn't
kill four people. In September,
a man shot and killed eight people in Plano, Texas -- but that attack doesn't count either because police say the gunman had a "connection to the house."
Using that narrow definition to the Gun Violence Archive numbers, we have seen
nine deadly mass shootings from
January 1 to October 3.
That averages to one a month.