In the wake of yet another mass shooting in the United States, the country’s steadily worsening statistics on gun-related violence have once again started invading headlines. When a couple fatally shot at least 14 people at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on Wednesday, the tragedy became the 355th mass shooting of 2015. In fact, the massacre in California was actually the second mass shooting on Wednesday alone, as NBC News notes that three people were wounded and one killed during a shooting Georgia earlier that day.
As we're still less than 340 days into 2015, this startling statistic means that this year has seen more mass shooting tragedies in the United States than days. Coupled with the University of Alabama Department of Criminal Justice's estimate that 31 percent of the world's mass shootings occur in the U.S., despite only containing five percent of the global population, the drastic need for reform once again becomes strikingly clear.
These seemingly constant incidents of violence are tracked by the Mass Shooting Tracker, a project that tracks shootings "in which four or more people are shot" with data compiled by the subreddit GunsAreCool. Wednesday's violence in San Bernardino reportedly marks the "deadliest mass shooting" in the U.S. since the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown in 2012. "We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world," President Obama told CBS News just hours after the killings in San Bernardino. "Our hearts go out to the victims and the families."
