Mass Shootings Compared: U.S is #7

Two countries that Obama cited, Great Britain and Australia, carried out national gun seizures.

Most statistics on mass shootings in the world compare apples and oranges, not correcting for population. Shall we get it straight?
The Rampage Shooting Index. Taken from a now-defunct website, this assembled data from around the world to construct a per capita mass shootings index that controls for population differences. [Update: Archived data based on OECD and other statistics can be found here.]

And since we’re just talking about members of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), we can assume these 34 countries are sufficiently “advanced” to enter into the discussion, by the liberal standard of such things.

The bottom line: The United States falls from number 1 due to its frequency of 38 mass shootings from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2013 (which would be number 1 without correcting for population) down to number 7.

Security Magazine commented on the data findings:
Between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2013,there were 413 fatalities from mass shootings in the 34 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). From the five-year period of 2008-2012, there were 373 total spree shooting fatalities.

According to the OECD’s latest version of the Rampage Shooting Index, a pair of deadly shootings in Switzerland in early 2013 pushed the U.S. out of the top five OECD nations for the most per capita fatalities, but the U.S. continues to have the most rampage shooting deaths (one reason could be its size – The U.S. population accounts for 25 percent of the OECD total). However, the U.S. saw a drop in mass shooting deaths from 93 in 2012 to 68 in 2013.

The U.S.’ index of 0.12 per 5,000,000 places it behind Norway (recall the Anders Breivik massacre), Finland, Slovakia, Israel, and Switzerland – at half the ratio.

Source: IJ Review
A final item to note: The top 5 listed countries for mass shootings per capita all boast of highly “restrictive” gun policies.