That's been the general 'rule of thumb' since 'going postal' stopped referring to means of shipping. I generally view it as about 1 mass attack per million people per lifetime, less but close enough conceptually, e.g. lower than your odds of being struck by lightning, which hits abut 400 people a year in the US and kills about 40 of them.



Well pointing the finger at other countries or cultures is a very common practice, so too is examining at other countries successes to point fingers at an incumbent. That comparisons beyond the most broad strokes is an exercise in absurdity never matters. The idea that the US might be exporting gun violence is hardly surprising but sounds like cheap political theater to me. I'd hardly be surprised if prior incidents caused copy cats or inspiration but blaming the US for that would seems as logical as blaming Japan if someone nerve-gassed a bus, or dropped a nuke on a city for that matter.



The problem with Nate's suggestion is that we rack up more murders every day than these spree killers do that day, most of the time they don't even account for half that day's murders. When we move outside of these rampage/spree types though the focus on assault rifles becomes fairly redundant. Pistols, knives, etc become just as if not more effective from a practical standpoint. 'Intentional Homicide' begin what I'd view as the real matter of note, in that vein, and the US has a current one of 4.7, as incidents per 100,000 people. On that measurement we fall into the lower-middle category, of 2-5, as opposed to the general six categories, less than 1, 1-2, 5-10, 10-20, and 20+, and they don't even try to keep data on almost all of Africa or some of the more obvious places. Here's the chart I'm citing and a color map More than half of Latin America is in the 20+ zone and almost all the remainder in the 2nd, 10-20, category. I don't accept the habit of tending to act as though Western Europe and the US are the lone bastions of wealth and civilization implied when people handwave away all those areas as somehow not counting. It doesn't explain why some countries like the Bahamas, which reasonably parallel European and American GDP/cap, have higher murder rates than the US while Poland, with a lower GDP/cap then the Bahamas, has a lower murder rate on par or lower than much of Western Europe.

I think, as a whole, and going back to what's talked of above, we tend to come up against trends where you can see patterns but always with an outlier or two, and people pick the outlier to discard to fit their preexisting narrative, but in a sample that includes around a hundred 'entities', examining a specific sample of ten or twelve nations where you've discarded on or two really makes comparisons a mostly futile game, though regrettably a very necessary one since not only will people do it anyway but because we really do need to keep our tabs on fellow countries or regions or metro areas to see what is and isn't working and if it might be adapted locally. A total ban on assault rifles could, conceivably, lower these spree killings but a total absence of them wouldn't even drop the US homicide rate by a single percentage point. We just don't have 140 or so of these deaths a year but we do have around 14,000 intentional homicides, and while many do involve guns, few really hinge on powerful ones and most don't even hinge on a gun themself. It's like suicide, you don't need a gun, and very few won't occur from an absence. Now individual murders of the mugging sort? Quite probably but almost all muggers are repeat offenders not allowed to buy guns or get conceal carry anyway.

Well, repeating stuff you already know I'm sure by now, my pardon. I just don't see a spree killing as a logical diving board for any debate that doesn't hinge specifically around things that would have had a realistic probability of preventing that specific incident. And I think people are using it that way