Since Jan. 1, 1992, there have been 134 shootings in a public space in the United States where at least four people have died. That's according to the Mass Shooter Database created and maintained by The Violence Project. In all, 801 people have died in the incidents.
These shootings have not been uniformly distributed around the country. In fact, 14 states have had zero of these events in this 30-year period. By comparison, Texas has had eight fatal mass shootings; California seven.
So where are you most likely to die in a public mass shooting? The numbers say: Nevada.
By dividing the number of people who have died in these shootings by the state's population, we get a rate. And Nevada's rate — 19.7 deaths per million people — is the highest among all the states,
Nevada's rate is due almost entirely to the 2017 murder of 58 people at the Route 91 Harvest musical festival in Las Vegas. There was only one other fatal public mass shooting in Nevada since 1991 — the murder of four people in Carson City in 2011.
Nevada is followed on this list by the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Colorado and Virginia. Full list is at the bottom.
That's the top of the rankings, but in many ways I'm more interested in the bottom. I feel like some lessons could be learned by looking at the 14 states that had zeros deaths: North Carolina, Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
What are those states doing right? I don't know, but we should try to find out.
It is too simplistic to dismiss the zero-death toll in these states as being due to the fact that most of them are small.
While it's true that some of the least-populated states, such as Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska, are in this zero-death group, so is North Carolina, which is the ninth-most populated state. While it has no deaths in this category over the last 30 years, Connecticut, with one-third as many people, has had 39.
Another way to put it would be to note that Colorado has about the same population as Iowa, Maine and Montana combined, but the former has had 39 deaths in public mass shootings since 1991 while the latter three have had zero. Again, why?
It should be noted that public fatal mass shooting are relatively rate. A total of 801 deaths over 30 years is 26.7 deaths per year. While each of those deaths is a tragedy, it is important to remember that 11,000 people in the U.S. are murdered by gun every year. Most of these happen in everyday places like in the home and at work. If you're going to be shot to death, it's far more likely that the killer will be someone you know rather than a random stranger.
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