School shootings are becoming a reality in America, an average of one shooting per week just this year alone.
But how does America compare with other countries around the world?
That’s difficult to measure because very little research was made to quantify this.
For the purposes of this kind of analysis, we followed certain criteria you will find below.
The scope:
First, we looked at G7 countries, the countries with the fast-growing and largest advanced economies in the world.
The countries are as follows, Canada, the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the UK.
The period of time: From the 1st of January, 2009 to May 21st, 2018.
Definition: The parameters we followed in this count are as follows:
- The shooting must involve at least 1 person being shot (with the shooter not being included)
- Shooting must occur on school grounds
- We included domestic violence, gang violence, and fights (but our count is NOT limited to these categories alone)
- We included school grades, Kindergarten through college/university level as well as a vocational school.
- We included accidental discharge of a weapon or a firearm as long as the first two parameters are met
Analysis: For US stats, CNN reviewed a variety of databases and media reports including those from the Gun Violence Archive and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. And we looked at local and national media reports for international stats.
The caution: Reporting on non-fatal school shootings is not available always. There may be school shootings with injuries that didn’t make it into the newspaper or other digital publications at all and therefore are not counted in databases that rely mainly on media reports. This is true for shootings inside the US and elsewhere.
we found this:
There have been at least 288 school shootings in the US alone since January the 1st, 2009.
That’s exactly 57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries stats combined.
Broadening out the list
Next, we wanted to broaden our list out to include some countries that were mentioned in a few of the viral posts that were going around this weekend.
the casualty count is very high in some incidents (the Peshawar siege; the Kenya attack). But the US still leads by a wide margin when it comes to the frequency of attacks.
