One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨aboringdystopia@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/one-in-15-americans-has-witnessed-a-mass-shooting-study

One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting, a new study shows, revealing the depth and impact of the epidemic of gun violence that has washed over the US in recent decades.

The study found that about 7% of US adults have been present at the scene of a mass shooting in their lifetime, and more than 2% have been injured during one, according to new a report from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Since 2014, there have been nearly 5,000 mass shootings documented nationwide, with more than 500 occurring annually since 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The percentage of Americans who have witnessed mass shootings is greater than the percentage of Americans who are trans

But they only seek to legislate one of the two

source
Today@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
This is a misleading headline. Obviously a mass shooting involves a mass of people so this is pretty localized, much higher in areas around those shootings but much lower in the rest of the country. It makes people in other countries think they will step off the plane into a shootout.

source
- ThePantser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  makes people in other countries think they will step off the plane into a shootout.
  
  They should probably not be stepping off a plane into the US right now anyways. It’s not safe for non USians to visit.
  
  source
  - PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It’s not even safe for many Americans. But what other choice do they have, when leaving is so prohibitively expensive and they’re trapped living paycheck to paycheck?
    
    source
  - Today@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Thousands of people enter the US every day for work, family, commerce, etc., most without incident.
    
    source
  - Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’ll agree it’s not safe if you come here with the intent of making it your home without going through the proper channels, or even working without getting a proper visa. I don’t see how someone traveling to America for a short visit is somehow unsafe. And yes, things are messed up, but they’re not plucking people off of planes and imprisoning them, they’re plucking people out of homes they’ve lived in for years without being properly documented.
    
    source
- sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  No, the title is completely accurate.
  
  7% of living American adults have witnessed a mass shooting at least once in their lifetimes.
  
  Mass shootings are increasingly common, all over the US.
  
  The paper the article is based on defines a mass shooting as 4 or more struck by a bullet, which is roughly a compromise, average of widely used but not perfectly standardized definitions of a mass shooting.
  
  This study was concerned with direct exposure to mass shootings, which were defined as “gun-related crimes where 4 or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or place of worship.” This definition was a compromise between the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass public shooting17 and the Gun Violence Archive’s mass shooting definition,2 designed to be inclusive of individuals who were injured and accessible to the public.
  
  Here’s the paper, two links deep from the article.
  
  jamanetwork.com/journals/…/2831132
  
  source
  - Today@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    “1 in 15” implies that you can ask 15 people and find one. Most Americans know more than 15 people and don’t know anyone who has witnessed a mass shooting. A small percentage know a lot of people who have.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
What a load of horseshit.

7% of US adults have been present at the scene of a mass shooting

No way in hell. I’m a gun nut, in the South. I’ve worked long hours in South Chicago. Never seen a gun fired in anger. Hell, I’ve hardly ever seen a gun in public that wasn’t on a cop.

more than 2% have been injured during one

Oh FFS. So 1-in-50 Americans have been shot? In a “mass shooting” no less?!

And let’s define mass shooting. Note the numbers from Mother Jones, not exactly a conservative rag now are they?

“physically present” as “in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred at the time it occurred, such that bullets were fired in your direction, you could see the shooter, or you could hear the gunfire”

Likely people answering, “Yes, I’ve heard gunfire, I think, maybe.”

2.18 % of respondents said they had been injured, which not only includes having been shot, but also struck by shrapnel or trampled by people fleeing the scene or suffering other injuries as they sought to escape

Oh my fuck me with these lies.

source
- sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Here’s the study, if you bother to click two links deep from this posted article.
  
  jamanetwork.com/journals/…/2831132
  
  They define a mass shooting as 4+ people struck with a bullet.
  
  2% of people report being injured because being trampled in a stampede or struck from a ricochet or bullet fragment counts as an injury.
  
  Stampede and ‘crowd-squeeze’ injuries are quite common in densely crowded areas where a shooting, or fire, or something incites a general panic and rush to flee, and can cause as much or more deaths and injuries in very dense crowds than the actual danger being fleed from.
  
  …
  
  Maybe actually read the methodology before constructing a strawman version of it and then tearing that down because your personal experience doesn’t match broader data.
  
  Your caricatured criticism of how they obtained the data, how they structured the survey, is completely baseless and innacurate.
  
  You say you’re 54, so by the study’s definition, you are Gen X, and are thus about twice as likely to have never been present for a mass shooting as a Millenial, about three times as likely to have never been present at a mass shooting as Gen Z.
  
  See Table 3.
  
  …
  
  You’re doing the stereotypical boomer thing, making up baseless nonsense critiques and assuming everyone involved is comically incompetent to justify your gut reaction.
  
  The reason surveys are done is because you can’t actually have any idea about broad social patterns when your only actual data point is the anecdote of your single life and its experiences.
  
  What’s actually sad is how confident you are in your own baseless, made up strawman criticisms and personal incredulity.
  
  If you think your criticisms have merit, I look forward to your own academically published paper taking down the specific methodological flaws you seem to think exist in a paper written by 3 PhDs in the fields of Sociology and Criminology, who are well trained in statistics and survey methodology.
  
  source
  - PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    You say you’re 54, so by the study’s definition, you are Gen X, and are thus about twice as likely to have never been present for a mass shooting as a Millenial, about three times as likely to have never been present at a mass shooting as Gen Z.
    See Table 3.
    
    Exactly. I’m in my mid 30’s and know several people who have witnessed mass shootings. I have personally been under active shooter lockdowns multiple times. Hell, my former roommate was shot in the ass by one at a music festival. This person saw “7% have witnessed an active shooting” and immediately called bullshit, because they’re part of the other 93% and are incapable of imagining anything outside of their (extremely narrow) lived experience. And that’s some real boomer attitude.
    
    source
- booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think you’re relying too heavily on your anecdotal experience here. Maybe you’ve never seen a gun fired in anger, but there are about 13,000 gun homicides per year.
  
  Plus, the nature of gatherings mean that a very small number of events can have many witnesses, especially if defined to include people who heard gunshots.
  
  Take the most extreme example, the 2017 Vegas shooting, the single worst mass shooting event in American history. There were people killed and injured in the event. Under anyone’s definition that was a mass shooting.
  
  There were 22,000 attendees at that music festival. How many staff, crew, contractors, vendors, performance artists and their own staffs? How many cops and first responders were there? How many were in the 3200-room hotel and casino who had to be evacuated during the response? How many people heard gunshots in the open air, or saw muzzle flashes from the hotel room? 50,000?
  
  Same with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Lots of people were within hearing range of the shots.
  
  These types of events have a lot of people present. If 4 people are dying from a shooting, what’s the average number of people wounded? How many are present?
  
  The math is somewhat counterintuitive, and can explain a lot of the high number.
  
  source
- Spendrill@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  And let’s define mass shooting.
  
  Last time I discussed this matter on reddit, before I deleted all my comments and left, the person I was arguing with said something like:
  
  More than four or more people in public space? That could include a routine gas station robbery gone wrong.
  
  source
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
This is a completely normal statistic. I heard it’s even higher in Canada. /s

source
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

The University of Colorado researchers defined “physically present” as “in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred at the time it occurred, such that bullets were fired in your direction, you could see the shooter, or you could hear the gunfire”.

Given how loud a gunshot is, that is a very wide net to cast. Still a remarkable statistic though.

source
deadcatbounce@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
This isn’t news. Since the second amendment’s Inception, it has never been used for its intended purpose.

There was an invasion of Government buildings in recent years and no-one took guns. Had they believed in the second amendment, that wouldn’t have been true.

I make no judgement as to whether that invasion was right or wrong.

Biden served out his term as expected as a person deep in dementia; a lesson about America to the whole world. That second amendment is just for school kids to shoot each other in school corridors, because someone cut you up in traffic or so one drug dealer to steal drugs from another drug dealer.

I write as a Brit being fucked over by an authoritarian Marxist government. Somehow we got infected by Woke from America (anyone else getting the irony there?) and all sides of our legislative bodies caught it.

But the icing on the cake is finding out that, as the world watched Russia invade Ukraine, Trump is a Russian asset.

Where is your second amendment now?

source