Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Some shooting stats

What with the (valid) concern about Islamic inspired terrorism, I see the media here is barely noticing your more routine violence in America, such as shooting last week in Orlando, Florida where a disgruntled employee killed 5 at his workplace. 

NPR has a follow up story on that, looking at some analysis of mass shootings since 2009 in the US, where the definition is that there are 4 or more killed.  The results are fairly surprising - the great, great majority are in a house - like 133 compared to 6 that were solely in a workplace.  (How much the figures are being skewed by selecting this particular definition of mass shooting is unclear, of course.)

But this makes a mockery of the gun right's lobby arguments about gun free zones, doesn't it?   Guns everywhere means a lot of mass shootings at home - often involving ex partners - and (obviously) in places where gun restrictions are irrelevant.

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