A Mother Jones project began in 2012 and attempted to recreate earlier years from news records going back to 1982. Early years report at most one or two incidents per year, which may indicate “headline bias” – finding only those incidents that were sufficiently sensational to attract national news coverage.

The cited FBI data from 2000 to 2015 omit the two biggest mass shootings after 2015 and others before 2000.  In addition to Columbine, there were four other mass shootings in 1999, bringing yearly fatalities to 42 fatalities. We can’t be sure which mass shootings were “the worst in American history,” because (1) history didn’t begin with 2000, and (2) Congress didn’t define mass shootings as 3 killed until 2013, and (3) systematic data about such incidents were not collected until 2012.

Adding a preliminary estimate of 17 deaths from Parkland to the Mother Jones list brings the total number of deaths up to 816 from 98 mass shootings between 1982 and early 2018 – or just 23 deaths per year.

That makes this sort of random mass shooting one of the rarest mortality risks imaginable.

Even when it comes to guns, 23 deaths a year pales next to the number of homicides by firearms in 2014 alone, which was 11,208 (69% of all homicides)  and the number of suicides by firearms, which was 21,386 (50% of all suicides).

Read the full article on mass shootings by Alan Reynolds at Cato Institute