There have been more mass shootings than days so far in 2024, with 49 mass shootings reported over the past 46 days.
These statistics are leading many people to worry if the next mass casualty event will happen in their immediate area.
The latest mass shooting that unfolded amid throngs of people at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl celebration on Wednesday resulted in 22 people injured and a woman killed.
Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said that the people injured in the shooting ranged between the ages of 8 and 47 years old, half of whom were under the age of 16.
The woman is Lisa Lopez-Galvan, host of “Taste of Tejano.”
The shooting comes after a near-record number of mass shootings in 2023. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides—an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed, excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. In 2022, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas—the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.