How community gun violence gets lost in the flood of mass shootings

Asked about gun violence in their debate last week, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) both focused their answers on school shootings, an issue that often dominates the headlines but represents a tiny fraction of American deaths from firearms.  

Experts say that while discussions around and solutions to mass shootings are imperative, the everyday gun violence Americans face can get lost in the shuffle. 

“When we see what's known as a public mass shooting [...] those do tend to get a lot of headlines, and they're extremely traumatizing, very scary and impactful, obviously for those who are injured, but then also for the entire community. And so, it makes sense why they get coverage, but those sorts of shootings only represent a small fraction of the gun violence or the gun homicides that we see every day,” said Kelly Sampson, director of racial justice and senior counsel for Brady United.  

Asked about gun violence during the vice-presidential debate, Vance honed in on ways of preventing school shootings specifically.

“I, unfortunately, think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger, and, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers, because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and [get the] guns out of the hands of bad guys” isn’t realistic, the senator said.   

While Walz did talk about his own experiences as a gun owner and the problem of firearm suicide, he also focused on school shootings in the wake of last month's deaths in Georgia.

And when politicians actually do focus on day-in, day-out gun violence, the conversation often becomes one of villainizing those who in live in high-crime areas, particularly in larger cities.

“People who have positions of leadership, they have outsized influence, and they can really shape the narrative. And right now, in many cases, the narrative about everyday gun violence is messed up. It tends to blame the communities that are most impacted and pathologize them, and act like this is something that is inevitable,” Sampson said. 

"We have people saying like, 'Well, it's about your culture or your race or your money.' And so, I think politicians and people who speak out all these issues and have attention can really change that narrative and say, like, 'Actually, let's look at the gun industry in this country that has so many exceptions in law and is treated so differently from other industries,'" she added.

According to John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solution, in 2022, more than 48,000 individuals died from gun violence in the U.S. This means someone was killed by a gun ever 11 minutes. Approximately 27,000 of those deaths were from suicide.

The same year, there were some 647 mass shootings in the U.S., and around 634 individuals were killed, according to the Gun Violence Archives, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people killed or injured.  

“According to the Archive of Gun Violence, [mass shootings] occur much more frequently that they have in the past. And those numbers have risen over time, within the last five or six years,” said Mallory O’Brien, an associate scientist and faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.  

And while national media attention is mostly focused on mass shootings, that outsized attention can be influencing policy in a way that doesn’t prioritize the everyday gun violence Americans experience.  

“I think these high profile incidents, you know, it's beyond just galvanizing media attention. I think they galvanize a lot of kind of, maybe political willpower to potentially change gun policies. And one concern might be that, if the focus is really on these relatively rare and sometimes seemingly idiosyncratic incidents, the types of policy solutions that are being put on the table may not be the most effective for kind of reducing gun violence writ large,” said Rosanna Smart, codirector of the RAND Gun Policy in America initiative. 

One of the examples Smart uses is the push for more restrictive red flag laws after mass shooting events, saying there is “limited evidence” it helps gun violence by suicide and “their effects in kind of reducing community interpersonal violence, I think is very inconclusive and conceptually a little more difficult to draw that line.” 

Other efforts such as fortifying schools have “little conceptual reason to believe that those would be effective in reducing broader forms of gun violence in communities.” 

“I would hope that to the extent that these incidents do galvanize political willpower to make changes to gun policy, they're being used as a platform to consider policies that might reduce these broader community violence, broader measures of community violence versus just these singular incidents, and maybe they'd reduce mass shootings and school shootings as well, but they potentially have a much bigger impact through reducing the burden on these communities that are very heavily impacted by gun violence every day,” Smart said.