On February 14, 2018, Florida became the site of America’s worst ever school shooting, with 17 dead, 14 of them students.
It’s the 30th mass shooting in the USA since the beginning of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. It’s also the 18th school shooting that’s occurred in two short months.
In 2017, there were literally hundreds of mass shooting incidents – 346, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
There are enough guns in American for every man, woman and child. So what are the chances an American will die as a result of gun violence?
According to Business Insider, who tallied a range of statistics, a US citizen has a 1 in 315 chance of dying via ‘assault by a gun’.
Listen: The Deadliest Mass Shooting in US History. Post continues below.
Comparatively, Americans have a 1 in 108 chance of dying via a motor vehicle accident, making a car accident less than three times more likely than death at the wrong end of a bullet. And that’s scary to think about.
Americans also have a 1 in 11,125 chance of dying in a mass shooting, and a 1 in 8,349 chance of being killed by an accidental gun shot.
The odds aren’t crushingly likely, but they’re also a little too close to home.
By comparison, in 2015, Australia had a total of 27 homicides in which a gun was used, according to Gunpolicy.org, and a total of 211 gun deaths, of which 177 were suicides.
Top Comments
Over 80% of gun deaths in America are gang/crime related, the majority of victims either black (80%) or hispanic (20%). Even if the gun laws were tightened in the USA, I doubt there would be much of a reduction in gun related deaths.
Was that estimate adjusted for race? The average white American has a far lower chance of dying from gun violence than a black contemporary. Indeed, if your mob is disproportionately less affected, it's easier to cast a blind eye....