Of the last mass shootings in the US, how many shooters were known to be NRA members and how many of the weapons used were legally owned by the shooters?
Of the last mass shootings in the US, how many shooters were known to be NRA members and how many of the weapons used were legally owned by the shooters?In approaching a question about "mass shootings in the US," the first problem one encounters is definitional.The United States' Congressional Research Service acknowledges that there is not a broadly accepted definition, and defines a "public mass shooting" as one in which four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed, echoing the FBI definition of the term "mass murder". Another unofficial definition of a mass shooting is an event involving the shooting (not necessarily resulting in death) of four or more people with no cooling-off period.See Mass shooting - WikipediaBased on the arbitrary definition of a shooting involving at least four deaths, there had been 130 mass shootings in the United States as of June 6, 2017, going back over the last 51 years. (This does not include gang killings, killings that began as other crimes such as robberies, and killings that involved only the shooter's family.)Information about how the guns were obtained is incomplete, but 248 different guns were used, at least 141 of which were obtained legally and at least 39 of which were obtained illegally; handguns were the most common weapons used, usually more than one, each of which takes about two seconds to reload, making limited magazines (commonly incorrectly referred to as “clips”) a minor inconvenience. None of the shooters were known to be members of the NRA.Worthy of note is that the victims of mass shootings constitute less than one half of one percent of shooting deaths. While tragic and newsworthy, such deaths are not statistically significant.https://www.washingtonpost.com/g...