U.S. tops world in mass shootings

The United States is, by a long shot, the global leader in mass shootings, claiming just 5 percent of the global population but an outsized share – 31 percent – of the world’s mass shooters since 1966, a new study finds.

The Philippines, Russia, Yemen and France – all countries that can claim a substantial share of the 291 documented mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 – collectively didn’t even come close to the United States.

And what makes the United States such a fertile incubator for mass shooters? A comprehensive analysis of the perpetrators, their motives and the national contexts for their actions suggests that several factors have conspired to create in the United States a potent medium for fostering large-scale murder.

Those factors include a chronic and widespread gap between Americans’ expectations for themselves and their actual achievement, Americans’ adulation of fame, and the extent of gun ownership in the United States.

Set those features against a circumstance the United States shares with many other countries – a backdrop of poorly managed mental illness – and you have a uniquely volatile brew, the new study says.

With those conclusions, University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford set out to illuminate the darker side of American “exceptionalism” – the notion that the United States’ size, diversity, political and economic institutions and traditions set us apart in the world. Lankford’s paper is among those being presented this week at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Chicago.

Perhaps no single factor sets the United States apart as sharply as does gun ownership, wrote Lankford. Of 178 countries included in Lankford’s analysis, the United States ranked first in per-capita gun ownership. A 2007 survey found 270 million firearms in U.S. civilian households – an ownership rate of 88.8 firearms per 100 people. Yemen followed, with 54.8 firearms per 100 people.

Across the world, countries’ rates of homicides and suicides bore no clear relation to their likelihood of mass shootings in Lankford’s analysis. In several countries with sky-high murder rates – Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria for instance – mass shootings were extremely rare.

But the association between national firearm ownership rates and number of mass shooters per country showed clear statistical significance, he found. Behind the United States’ top spot, Finland and Switzerland rank third and fourth, respectively, in per-capita gun ownership. While both countries enjoy vaunted reputations as safe places to live, both (along with No. 2 Yemen and No. 5 Serbia) ranked in the top 15 countries internationally for mass shooters per capita.