If You Look at This
Chart of Top 10 Nations in the World for Mass Shootings – One Thing Jumps Out
By Kyle Becker (4 months ago) | World
After the tragic Charleston shooting that left 9 Americans
dead, President Obama said the following:
But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will
have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in
other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of
frequency.
But is that true?
Since most statistics on mass shootings in the world compare
apples and oranges by not correcting for population, let’s get a chart that
makes sense, shall we?
Boom, here we go: The Rampage Shooting Index. Taken from a now-defunct website, it assembled data
from around the world to construct a per capita mass shootings index that
controls for population differences. [Update: Archived
data based on OECD and other statistics can be found here.]
And since we’re just talking about members of the OECD
(Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), we can assume these
34 countries are sufficiently “advanced” to enter into the discussion.
The bottom line: The United States falls from number one due
to its frequency of 38 mass shootings from January 1, 2009
to December 31, 2013 (which would be number one without correcting for
population) to number seven.
Security Magazine commented
on the data findings:
Between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2013,there were
413 fatalities from mass shootings in the 34 member states of the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). From the five-year period of
2008-2012, there were 373 total spree shooting fatalities.
According to the OECD’s latest version of the Rampage
Shooting Index, a pair of deadly shootings in Switzerland in early 2013 pushed
the U.S. out of the top five OECD nations for the most per capita fatalities,
but the U.S. continues to have the most rampage shooting deaths (one reason
could be its size – The U.S. population accounts for 25 percent of the OECD
total). However, the U.S. saw a drop in mass shooting deaths from 93 in 2012 to
68 in 2013.
The U.S.’ index of 0.12 per 5,000,000 places it behind Norway
(recall the Anders
Breivik massacre), Finland, Slovakia, Israel, and Switzerland – at
half the ratio.
Another thing one might note: The top 5 countries for
mass shootings per capita all have “restrictive” gun policies.
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