Twin shooting incidents highlight American mass-shooting exceptionalism

Americans went to bed on Saturday night with news that a shooter had killed two people at Brown University and woke up on Sunday morning to news that gunmen had massacred 16 people on a beach in Australia. The terror and disgrace of gun violence, hours apart on the opposite sides of the world.

The 16 deaths on Bondi Beach, where two men targeted Jewish people celebrating the start of Hanukkah, were the worst such incident in that country this century. There have been 10 mass-killing incidents using firearms since 2001; more people were killed and wounded on Sunday than in the other nine mass-killing incidents combined.

Here, I’m using a definition of “mass killing” that includes incidents in which at least three people were shot to death, excluding the shooter. This definition is certainly debatable, but it’s what I’m using because it’s also what’s used for Mother Jones’s database of shooting incidents in the U.S.

If we add mass-killing incidents in the U.S. since 2001, you can see that the Australian incidents are quickly dwarfed. (You can mouseover or click the colors to see each country’s incidents.) Nine of the 120-plus incidents in the U.S. since 2001 had larger death tolls than Bondi Beach. Three resulted in more injuries.

You might have noticed that the chart above doesn’t include the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history: the attack on a concert in Las Vegas during Donald Trump’s first term in office. That’s because it obliterates the scale of the chart on both axes.

What happened at Bondi Beach was horrible. It would also have been only the tenth deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this century.

It’s worth noting that the U.S. also has a significantly larger population than Australia. But U.S. mass killing incidents have been deadlier even relative to population. The incidents in Australia killed 1.86 people for every million current residents. The incidents in the U.S. killed 2.12.

In fact, the shooting at Brown University was relatively unremarkable in the context of American gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 22 incidents in which more people were killed in a mass shooting (defined as an incident in which at least four people are shot) and 24 incidents in which more people were wounded this year alone.

The incident at Bondi Beach was only the second-worst mass killing in Australian history. The first was a shooting rampage in 1996 that left 35 people dead. In the wake of that incident, the Australian government implemented a number of strict limits on firearms possession, helping to tamp down incidents like the one this weekend.

Following its more numerous massacres, the U.S. has not done the same.

Photo: An AR-15 at a range in Connecticut. (National Archives)