Profile of a School Shooter: Ingredient 11 - The American Gun Culture

There is only one single ingredient that every mass shooting has had in common, the gun. This is also the one topic guaranteed to bring out the highest emotions.

Mass shootings are not uniquely American, but 31% of the worlds mass shootings take place in America, while accounting for only 5% of the worlds population.

America is a gun culture, there is no debating that fact. 320 million Americans own around 350 million guns. The United States can now arm nearly every man, woman and child from shore to shore and still have guns left over. With numbers like that it might seem that every American owns a gun, but only about 40% of the population owns guns. while 3% of the country owns one half of all of the guns.

By far the most common guns used in massacres are those that can do the most damage in the least amount of time. Semi-automatic handguns are the chosen weapon in over 70% of mass shootings. Semi-automatic rifles are a second choice, followed by shotguns and then revolvers.

Mass shootings average about 12.5 minutes, with around 8 fatalities per incident, and 13 injuries. The Las Vegas Strip Massacre lasted 11 minutes total, and left 58 dead. Modern weapons allow large numbers of injuries to be inflicted in a matter of minutes.

Of the weapons used in mass shootings, 75% of them were obtained legally. The majority of the shooters were able to pass a background check without issue, even when there were prior red flags in their history, none of them showed up on background checks.

The remaining 25% that were not legal were either purchased legally through a 3rd party, (Columbine, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook) or stolen from a legal owner. The Jonesboro shooters stole them from a family member who had them stored and locked with a cable, the Red Lake shooter used a .22 to kill his grandfather who was a police officer, the subsequent school shooting was committed with the stolen police issue weapons. In these cases the legal owners had taken reasonable measures to keep the guns safe. The guns were stored properly, in most cases locked away.

The gun debate in America isn't likely to be settled soon, but it is clear that there are some major holes in the system that must be plugged before mass shootings will become a thing of the past.






https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=718911
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476409/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-weapon-types-used/
https://cj.ua.edu/profiles/adam-lankford/