Every day the headlines and the TV-radio news scream murder at us. My local daily out of Newark, NJ leads with a murder there and elsewhere in the state every day. Only the occasional mass murder gets national attention.
I got to thinking about this on Friday when a shooting at the Los Angeles airport closed the facility and created havoc for all the flights going out or heading in. Reportedly, it was a mentally ill young man and, in the case of these random and mass murders, it is almost always a mentally ill person. It has nothing to do with how many people have guns.
Grant Duwe, a criminologist, told the National Public Radio that “Mass murder rates and mass public shootings have been on the decline, but what we did see was an especially bad year for mass public shootings in 2012. The number of victims who were killed and wounded was greater than in any previous year in U.S. history.”
The statistic Duwe cited is astonishingly low, only 0.2 percent of all homicides that occur in the U.S. are mass murders and, of those mass murders, ten percent are mass public killings, such as those in Aurora, Newtown, and most recently the Washington Navy Year. “Within a given year, there are about 30 mass murders—those involving four or more—that occur in this country.”
That should be regarded as good news given the size of our population. The U.S has more guns per person than most nations. When a Russian official tweeted about the Navy Yard shootings, NPR noted that there are “fewer than 13 million firearms in circulation in Russian, compared to 300 million in the United States. That works out to about nine guns per 100 people in Russian and closer to 100 guns per 100 people in America.” Russia has some of the toughest gun laws on the books as any nation, but there were an estimated 21,603 killings in Russia in 2009. By comparison, there were 13,636 homicides in the U.S. in 2009.