One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting

[parmalee]

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.

One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study

Study found that 7% of Americans have been present at a scene of a mass shooting and 2% had been injured in one

www.theguardian.com

Wait... what?!

OK, 7 percent of Americans is over 20 million. 5000 mass shootings in the past decade, or, roughly 500 annually since 2020. So let's say 20 thousand mass shootings over the past half-century (though I believe the number is much lower). So, at least 1000 witnesses per mass shooting--that is, with no overlap, of course.

This doesn't make sense, right?

Here's how they define "present":

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”.

This just sounds like bullshit to me. Also, there's no way that 2 percent of adults--so at least 5 or 6 million--have been injured in a mass shooting.

 

[Sarkus]

Sounds questionable, but might be explained by their sample. E.g. if they only polled people in cities?
Just spit-balling.

 

[ольга]

One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study

Study found that 7% of Americans have been present at a scene of a mass shooting and 2% had been injured in one

www.theguardian.com

Wait... what?!

OK, 7 percent of Americans is over 20 million. 5000 mass shootings in the past decade, or, roughly 500 annually since 2020. So let's say 20 thousand mass shootings over the past half-century (though I believe the number is much lower). So, at least 1000 witnesses per mass shooting--that is, with no overlap, of course.

This doesn't make sense, right?

Here's how they define "present":


This just sounds like bullshit to me. Also, there's no way that 2 percent of adults--so at least 5 or 6 million--have been injured in a mass shooting.

Ну, благими намерениями всегда прикрываются. Сейчас они начнут рассказывать, что оружие на руках населения, это плохо и опасно. Потом начнут кампанию о его запрете. А потом окажется, что безоружные люди бессильны что-либо противопоставить вооружённым представителям авторитарного режима. Умные учатся на чужих ошибках, а дураки на своих - не будьте дураками.

 

[Seattle]

One in 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting – study

Study found that 7% of Americans have been present at a scene of a mass shooting and 2% had been injured in one

www.theguardian.com

Wait... what?!

OK, 7 percent of Americans is over 20 million. 5000 mass shootings in the past decade, or, roughly 500 annually since 2020. So let's say 20 thousand mass shootings over the past half-century (though I believe the number is much lower). So, at least 1000 witnesses per mass shooting--that is, with no overlap, of course.

This doesn't make sense, right?

Here's how they define "present":


This just sounds like bullshit to me. Also, there's no way that 2 percent of adults--so at least 5 or 6 million--have been injured in a mass shooting.

This professor studies gangs in the Denver area so the Guardian is misrepresenting its widespread application.

 

[parmalee]

From the phys.org article:

Three-quarters of the respondents experienced mass shootings in their local communities—in places like bars or restaurants, schools, shopping outlets and synagogues.

One in 15 US adults has been on the scene of a mass shooting, study finds

About 7% of U.S. 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 University of Colorado Boulder research.

phys.org

These aren't places that typically hold more than 1000 people.

And this:

While these numbers might seem high, Pyrooz said he was not surprised by the survey results. A single mass shooting can impact far more people than many realize.

For instance, during the 2017 shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music festival in Las Vegas, the shooter killed 60 people and wounded 413 others. But another 454 people were injured during the ensuing panic as people fled to safety. In all, there were about 22,000 people at the concert—plus onlookers from surrounding hotels on the Las Vegas strip.

"That translates to about one out of every 11,000 Americans who were on the scene of that shooting alone," said Pyrooz. "Continue that to other events that have occurred around the country and the numbers, unfortunately, add up."

Or, a majority of Americans are functionally illiterate and effectively incapable of communication, generally, and they didn't fully "understand" the questions. Since 3/4 of these shootings occurred in places that typically hold far, far less than 1000 people, just how many of these mass shootings happened in places where several thousand could conceivably "witness" such, to make up for that?

I'm just not seeing how the numbers "add up".

 

[TheVat]

Now they will start telling us that weapons in the hands of the population are bad and dangerous. Then they will start a campaign to ban them. And then it will turn out that unarmed people are powerless to oppose armed representatives of an authoritarian regime. Smart people learn from other people's mistakes, and fools from their own - don't be fools

Hi, Olga. The problem with the theory that an armed populace deters authoritarian regimes is that in modern times armies have weaponry way beyond rifles. We could buy everyone in my city an AR-15 rifle, and they would be about as useful as slingshots against a professional military assault which would include tanks, artillery, RPGs, precision air strikes, missiles, etc. What is more likely is that authoritarians take over with a soft coup - propaganda, election tampering, extortion of judges and other officials, etc. The AR-15 would be more likely used by fools to handle personal disputes and domestic arguments, and not fending off tyranny. Your idea is sweet, but we are well past the 18th century when that kind of citizen action was feasible.

 

[TheVat]

This professor studies gangs in the Denver area so the Guardian is misrepresenting its widespread application.

Some sort of sampling error there, for sure. I almost want to say a decimal point got moved in transcribing somewhere.

 

[exchemist]

Hi, Olga. The problem with the theory that an armed populace deters authoritarian regimes is that in modern times armies have weaponry way beyond rifles. We could buy everyone in my city an AR-15 rifle, and they would be about as useful as slingshots against a professional military assault which would include tanks, artillery, RPGs, precision air strikes, missiles, etc. What is more likely is that authoritarians take over with a soft coup - propaganda, election tampering, extortion of judges and other officials, etc. The AR-15 would be more likely used by fools to handle personal disputes and domestic arguments, and not fending off tyranny. Your idea is sweet, but we are well past the 18th century when that kind of citizen action was feasible.

Worse than that, the prevalence of firearms can enable unofficial MAGA groups to intimidate unhelpful judges, journalists or even politicians - modern day brownshirts, guided by internet hints rather than overt control.

 

[parmalee]

Some sort of sampling error there, for sure. I almost want to say a decimal point got moved in transcribing somewhere.

Even beyond methodological errors, or even just sampling or transcription errors, I've always found polls that ask anything more than the most basic unambiguous questions to be incredibly frustrating. One needn't even be functionally illiterate to misinterpret some of these queries. Without looking at the actual poll, this is what we know as far as defining "physically present" goes:

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”.

"Bullets were fired in your direction"??? How is one to interpret that? How is one even to know such a thing? What degree between the shooter, the witness and the trajectory of the bullets constitutes "your direction"? 15 degrees? 30 degrees? And these are mass shootings, so several bullets were fired. Doesn't a person need to consult some sort of diagram at least before answering this?

 

[Seattle]

If you can hear the bullets, that would be enough. I'm sure the problem is the sampling population. Is this East Side Chicago or Des Moines Iowa suburbs? There is no way 7% of the US population is accurate.

 

[parmalee]

If you can hear the bullets, that would be enough. I'm sure the problem is the sampling population. Is this East Side Chicago or Des Moines Iowa suburbs? There is no way 7% of the US population is accurate.

It's possible that in a very crowded setting with, say, loud music, you might not hear the shooting. And you likely wouldn't see the shooter, either, leaving only "bullets fired in your direction". I figure some responded in the affirmative based solely on that.

But, yeah, I just don't see how 7 percent of the populace could have witnessed a mass shooting. The ones that are at music festivals, and in other very large crowds, are relatively uncommon. Most, as the respondents suggested, occur in places with maybe a capacity for 100 or 200 people. And plenty occur outside of large cities, as well, where very large crowds are just uncommon.

But that 2 percent figure for those who've sustained injuries seems even more ridiculous--I mean, 6 million people injured at mass shootings?

 

[Seattle]

It's possible that in a very crowded setting with, say, loud music, you might not hear the shooting. And you likely wouldn't see the shooter, either, leaving only "bullets fired in your direction". I figure some responded in the affirmative based solely on that.

But, yeah, I just don't see how 7 percent of the populace could have witnessed a mass shooting. The ones that are at music festivals, and in other very large crowds, are relatively uncommon. Most, as the respondents suggested, occur in places with maybe a capacity for 100 or 200 people. And plenty occur outside of large cities, as well, where very large crowds are just uncommon.

But that 2 percent figure for those who've sustained injuries seems even more ridiculous--I mean, 6 million people injured at mass shootings?

Technically all you need are 4 to be a mass shooting so most are just drug shootouts.

 

[billvon]

OK, 7 percent of Americans is over 20 million. 5000 mass shootings in the past decade, or, roughly 500 annually since 2020. So let's say 20 thousand mass shootings over the past half-century (though I believe the number is much lower). So, at least 1000 witnesses per mass shooting--that is, with no overlap, of course.

Sounds unlikely.

I think I might have met that criteria once; I was in Kearney Mesa once when I heard gunshots, but only two people were shot (a bystander and the perp.) I don't know if that's defined as a "mass shooting" or not. This was about 15 years ago, and I didn't even know what had happened until the next day when I read about it on line.

When we moved about eight years ago, we sold our old house to another San Diego couple. The closing was imminent but the buyer was flaking out, and we were getting worried about the endless excuses. Then their agent called us and explained that she was still dealing with issues after being shot in Las Vegas during the 2017 Vegas shooting, and she needed more time. We gave it to them and they closed on the house.

 

[parmalee]

Technically all you need are 4 to be a mass shooting so most are just drug shootouts.

Most definitions of "mass shooting" explicitly excludes these:

]Definitions vary, with no single, broadly accepted definition.[1][2][3] One definition is an act of public firearm violence—excluding gang killings, domestic violence, or terrorist acts sponsored by an organization—in which a shooter kills at least four victims.

Mass shootings in the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

___________

Also, this:

Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States.

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/27/health/u-s-most-mass-shootings/index.html

So add that to the roughly 5000 that occurred between 2014 and 2024 and you get... roughly 5000 mass shootings over the past 60 years. So now we get 20 million people "witnessing" 5000 mass shootings, or, roughly 4000 witnesses per shooting.

How did the people who did this study not see the absurdity in their conclusions?

 

[parmalee]

Here's my tentative hypothesis for this curiosity:

I have discovered that a lot of younger people--by which I mean, roughly, persons born after 1990--confuse things they come across on social media and the internets for things they've personally experienced. I've witnessed this on many occasions. Here's an example:

Tim Pool once claimed that he had had a conversation with Sam Seder in which Seder "complained" about his diminished role on Bob's Burger's. THis never happened. What really happened is that Sam Seder has periodically jokingly complained about his diminished role on the show with H Jon Benjamin on The Majority Report. Pool, being young and being an idiot, confused these clips with conversations that he was personally a part of. Here's the story in video format:

Now don't get confused, you were not a part of this conversation. You simply watched a video (if, in fact, you watched the video. I recommend it--it's highly entertaining!)

 

[ольга]

Hi, Olga. The problem with the theory that an armed populace deters authoritarian regimes is that in modern times armies have weaponry way beyond rifles. We could buy everyone in my city an AR-15 rifle, and they would be about as useful as slingshots against a professional military assault which would include tanks, artillery, RPGs, precision air strikes, missiles, etc. What is more likely is that authoritarians take over with a soft coup - propaganda, election tampering, extortion of judges and other officials, etc. The AR-15 would be more likely used by fools to handle personal disputes and domestic arguments, and not fending off tyranny. Your idea is sweet, but we are well past the 18th century when that kind of citizen action was feasible.

Нет, танки и авиация хороши для военных действий на поле боя против чужих армий. В партизанской войне они бесполезны. Ну и кроме всего, понимание того, что вам есть чем ответить, побуждает полицейского сказать Вам "Сэр", а не "Эй ты там".

 

[geordief]

Sounds unlikely.

I think I might have met that criteria once; I was in Kearney Mesa once when I heard gunshots, but only two people were shot (a bystander and the perp.) I don't know if that's defined as a "mass shooting" or not. This was about 15 years ago, and I didn't even know what had happened until the next day when I read about it on line.

When we moved about eight years ago, we sold our old house to another San Diego couple. The closing was imminent but the buyer was flaking out, and we were getting worried about the endless excuses. Then their agent called us and explained that she was still dealing with issues after being shot in Las Vegas during the 2017 Vegas shooting, and she needed more time. We gave it to them and they closed on the house.

Getting off topic but ,as Europeans we went to Washington DC in the 70s and stayed with people we knew who lived there for a day or two.

While we were there with them they explained to us that the loud bangs we were hearing quite frequently at night (and which we assumed were the sounds of car exhausts backfiring )- were in fact gun shots.

Perhaps that would have been because they had an apartment that was fairly high up and so those sounds were easier to hear than on ground level.

Anyway,that was their residential "background noise " .

I don't know if that situation continues today.

 

[Pinball1970]

While we were there with them they explained to us that the loud bangs we were hearing quite frequently at night (and which we assumed were the sounds of car exhausts backfiring )- were in fact gun shots.

I can relate.
4am in a hotel room it starts to go off and you think to yourself, "So if they attacked here how safe would I be?"

That is why I always check two means of escaping from a building and memorize it.
Hotels and conferences.
Not much travelling since COVID so I have not done that for a while.
I would still love to visit the states despite gun crime, perhaps in four years or so.

 

[geordief]

I can relate.
4am in a hotel room it starts to go off and you think to yourself, "So if they attacked here how safe would I be?"

That is why I always check two means of escaping from a building and memorize it.
Hotels and conferences.
Not much travelling since COVID so I have not done that for a while.
I would still love to visit the states despite gun crime, perhaps in four years or so.

I worked a few months in Boston and rented a room in an apartment building .
(incidentally it was the time when the advice I followed was to avoid eye contact with strangers -not sure if that still applies)

When I left I was told that the area was recently prone to fires in the buildings and the main reason was the landlords setting fire to their own properties so as to make the insurance claim.

Prior to that I had hitch hiked from Oregon all the way across and the "best" lift I got (some 36 hours) was from a man who told me that he was going to his ex girlfriend's house to shoot their dog.

 

[C C]

[...] This just sounds like bullshit to me. [...]

In the long aftermath of the replication crisis debut, there's a stream of reports poking at the reproducibility problem in the soft sciences. (Of course, if these investigations themselves categorize in the broad territory of those disciplines, then they might be construed as entangled in a paradox. )

• ‘Why is it that nobody can reproduce anybody else’s findings?’: "Biomedical scientists around the world publish around 1 million new papers a year. But a staggering number of these cannot be replicated. [...] If you look at all the published literature—not just the indexed articles on PubMed but everything that is published anywhere—probably 90% of it is not reproducible. That was shocking even to me. And probably 20–30% of it is totally made up."

The gist being that in this era there are potentially easy grounds for dismissing research in the human-related sciences, should such appear either "way, way out" or seem to just be conforming to currently popular theories of the humanities and to trendy political/moral attitudes.

In the end, many of us may be accepting slash recruiting or rejecting a study on the basis of how useful it is for supporting our personal presuppositions or for undermining those rival views that we disfavor beforehand. Since even IF much of the output is actually unreliable, the soft sciences still provide a kind of approved or pseudo-vetted "dogma" that is more respectable than the depreciated "articles of faith" from the old days.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Direct Exposure to Mass Shootings Among US Adults

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132

EXCERPTS: Younger individuals, particularly the Millennial generation and Generation Z, were more likely to report being physically present on the scene and/or injured in a mass shooting compared with older generations. This generational difference could be partly attributable to the increasing frequency of mass shootings over time...

Males were more likely than females to report direct exposure to mass shootings, which is consistent with broader patterns of gun violence exposure, where males, particularly young males, face higher risks...

[...] Black respondents reported higher rates of being present at mass shootings compared with White respondents, consistent with longstanding research on the racial disparities in exposure to gun violence....
- - - - - -

[...] Of the 10 000 respondents included in the analysis, 51.34% ... were female. In terms of race and ethnicity, 3.04% ... were Asian, 12.46% ... were Black, 16.04% ...]were Hispanic, 62.78% ... were White, and 5.67% ... were other race or ethnicity.

The findings indicated that 6.95% ... of respondents were present at the scene of a mass shooting, and 2.18% ... sustained physical injuries, such as being shot or trampled, during such incidents. A total of 54.89% of mass shootings to which respondents were exposed occurred in 2015 or more recently, and 76.15% took place in respondents’ local communities.

Mass shootings were most likely to occur in neighborhoods. Younger individuals ... and males ... were more likely to report exposure compared with those from older generations or female individuals, respectively. Black respondents reported higher rates of being present at mass shootings ..., while Asian respondents reported lower rates ... compared with White respondents, but there were no racial and ethnic differences in injuries sustained.
- - - - - -

Sample matching was undertaken by first generating a target sample drawn at random from the target population. A matched sample was then created based on selecting individuals to be interviewed matched to the target sample from a large pool of online opt-in panelists.

[...] Individuals who opt in to the online panel were sent a generic email with an invitation to participate in an online survey. They were prompted to click a link that leads them to a landing page that described the study, “Exposure to Gun Violence in the United States.” Upon providing written informed consent to take part in the study, respondents completed an online self-administered custom survey designed to yield information on exposure to gun violence.

The survey contained multiple sections (eg, demographic, economic, firearm exposure, political, and social) and was completed in approximately 12 minutes by respondents. The number of questions varied by participants based on the degree of their various exposure. Participants were compensated by the market research firm for their survey completion using a point system. The eMethods in Supplement 1 reports additional information on data quality, sampling, generalizability checks, and assessment of nonrandom sample selection.
_