Mass shootings happen in US 'every day'

How often do mass shootings occur in the US?  More than one a day.

That is how often, on average, shootings that left four or more people injured or dead occurred in the United States this year, according to compilations of episodes derived from news reports.

Including the worst mass shooting of the year that unfolded horrifically on Wednesday in San Bernardino, California, a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been injured in earlier shootings, many of which occurred on streets or in public settings, the databases indicate.

It is impossible to know whether the number of such shootings has risen in recent years because the databases go back only a couple of years. And experts fiercely debate whether mass shootings that involve four or more deaths are on the rise. Four or more dead is a standard used by congressional researchers and other experts who study mass killings.

Nonetheless, the stream of shootings this year — including an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado that left three dead last week and a shooting at a community college in Oregon that left 10 dead, including the gunman, in October — has intensified the debate over the accessibility of powerful firearms.

Two databases that track mass shootings — shootingtracker.com and gunviolencearchive.org — depend on news accounts and are not official. Nonetheless, they give an indication of the widespread nature of such episodes. Since January, there have been at least 354 such cases in about 220 cities in 47 states, shootings, according to shootingtracker.com.

Ted Alcorn, the research director for Everytown for Gun Safety said the shootings with multiple victims were just a small subset of everyday gun violence in America. "You have 14 people dead in California and that's a horrible tragedy," he said. "But likely 88 other people died today from gun violence in the United States."