Once more with feeling: It isn’t about mass shooting deaths. It is about shooting deaths. We don’t only count car accidents in big cars. We don’t only count heart attacks in tall people. If your perception of America’s gun violence problem is centered on the notion of “a few” mass shootings, then please consider that for every mass shooting victim this year, there are THOUSANDS of individual gun-related deaths.
This sounds callous but from a statistical and policy standpoint, mass shootings are an insignificant distraction from the real issue. 75 people will die in America today from guns. Nine of them will dominate the news channels and Facebook walls. The other 66 will go unmentioned. Tomorrow 75 more will die, none of them in mass shootings. I wish we would stop taking our collective eye off the ball.