USA has 5% of world population and 31% of world’s mass shooters

Good Day World!

Why does the USA have the most mass shooters per capita than any country in the world?

The answer may lie between the availability of guns and people seeking fame.

A just-released study found that although the United States has just about 5 percent of the world's population, it has 31 percent of the world's mass shooters.

The possible association between mass shootings and a desire for fame is particularly eerie, given the nation's latest high-profile killing.

A former employee at a local news station in Virginia killed a reporter and a cameraman on-air, while filming the shooting with a GoPro camera. He later posted the film to social media.

The apparent desire to broadcast the crime places the killer in the same company as many notorious mass shooters of the past decade. (The History of Human Aggression)

YOUTH MOVEMENT

Experts are finding that younger shooters want attention. That's why you see them wanting to have a bigger head count, a bigger body count, to try to outdo the last one or to do something that is going to cause more of a rise.

OVERALL CRIME STATS DROPPING

Interestingly, the rise in active-shooter events bucks the general trend toward less violent crime in the United States: Overall violent crime dropped 14.5 percent between 2004 and 2013, according to the FBI.

What did predict the number of mass shootings, however, was the prevalence of firearm ownership. Countries with higher firearm ownership rates have more public mass shootings. [Private Gun Ownership in the US (Infographic)]

Studies within the United States have also found links between gun ownership and gun crime.

Research published in July found that states with more gun-owning households had higher rates of firearm assault, robbery, homicide and overall homicide compared with states with fewer gun owners.

There is a 'fame at any cost' mentality.

Many mass killers explicitly cite fame as their motivation: A quick Google search for "wanted to top Columbine" reveals multiple news articles about killers or would-be killers mentioning the 1999 school shooting as their inspiration.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

The answer is simple, but probably unattainable thanks to gun lobbies and the NRA – make it harder to buy guns by having a nationwide backround check on prospective buyers.

Also, get the media to focus more on victims instead of their killers who are looking for their 15-minutes of fame.

Time for me to walk on down the road…