The Mass Shooting Tracker tallied its 351st shooting of 2015 on Friday, when Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. killed three and injured nine at a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In a separate shooting incident on the same day in Sacramento, California, two were killed and two injured.
There is no official count of how many mass shootings have taken place in America this year. The FBI counts “mass killings” as incidents in which three or more were killed, but The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a “mass shooting” as an incident when at least four people are injured or killed, including the gunman.
Some of the news reports cited by The Tracker headline how many people were injured during a shooting, but upon reading for details, not all of the injuries resulted from gunfire. Still, 345 mass shootings averages out to more than one per day in 2015.
In a study conducted by University of Alabama Criminal Justice Professor Adam Lankford using the mass shooting definition of four or more killed, nearly one-third of all mass shootings worldwide between 1966 and 2012 were found to occur in the US. Ninety mass shootings were recorded in those 46 years – five times more than in the next country, the Philippines, which had 18.
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