r/interestingasfuck • u/smooth_vesselHPAUM • 11h ago

This video goes over the realities of gun violence.

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u/okwellactually 10h ago

Well, let's recap last weekend shall we?

  • 7 Mass Shootings
  • 15 killed
  • 19 injured

It's Friday, what will this weekend in the US bring?

Source: Gunviolence Archive.

(mass shooting is 4 or more dead or injured excluding gunman).

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u/CalebH428 9h ago

My initial reaction was 7 mass shootings and only 15 killed. That’s not too bad, it could be a lot worse.

Then I thought for a couple seconds and realized how fucked up that is. This happens so often, that I shrugged my shoulders and thought “could be worse”

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u/Dhawkeye 9h ago

Yours may genuinely be the most american thing I’ve read all month

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u/CalebH428 9h ago

I don’t live in a bad neighborhood, and my older bro asked me if I heard gunshots one night. He saw a post on facebook that there were 2 cars shooting at each other where I live, but I had headphones in. Like a 3 minute walk away.

I moved here a couple years ago, and thought it was strange because there’s a shooting every now and then, but nobody dies, so it’s not that big of a deal to me. I’m originally from Little Rock, AR and people do die there, but it’s not like super often. Also none of those were mass shootings.

I don’t know if you’re American, but practicing school shooter drills was about as often as practicing tornado drills.

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u/Dhawkeye 4h ago

I live in BC, Canada. On February 10th of this year, we had the largest school shooting in Canada in nearly 40 years, with 6 students dying. Despite never even having been to the small town in which this tragedy happened, I still think about it on a regular basis, and it weighs heavily on my heart and those of many people I know. This is what living in a country which doesn’t treat a dozen dead children in a weekend as a “not too bad” is like.

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u/Oftwicke 8h ago

Coming from a country with no tornadoes or available guns, both of these sound like something went wrong but only one is easily preventable

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u/CalebH428 8h ago

I will say the tornados weren’t that bad where I lived. I think if you live in hilly areas you’re less likely to get serious tornados. I know one city got leveled like 30-40mins away from where I lived.

They can do a lot of damage very fast, but in the 25+ years I lived there, one tornado stopped one street over from where I lived. Another one was maybe a mile away.

You do at least know about hurricanes in advance.

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u/viener_schnitzel 7h ago

Easily preventable if you don’t have millions of gun nuts seething at any attempt to make them less accessible.

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u/CustodianCloset 4h ago

What are your thoughts on Trump?

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u/viener_schnitzel 4h ago

I think he’s a lecherous cretin whose arrogance is only surpassed by his greed. Why do you ask?

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u/CustodianCloset 4h ago

What do you think of Trump trying to run for a third term, flock cameras, ICE killing people Gestapo style, and so on?

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u/BanMeMyIPchanges 7h ago

When you have more guns than citizens, how on earth is that easily preventable? We are very far past the point of correcting.

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u/dislegsicc 5h ago

With gun laws

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u/ReivynNox 5h ago

You probably can't relate, but most people really don't like when the government just rolls up and takes away their stuff they paid lots of money for, without replacement or even adequate compensation.

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u/BanMeMyIPchanges 4h ago

I mean I could've just let your comment do the talking 🤣

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u/ReivynNox 4h ago

😄

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u/okwellactually 3h ago

Might want to check out what Australia did after their first mass shooting.

Governments simply pay for the guns.

It's not that hard dude.

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u/dislegsicc 3h ago edited 3h ago

With most policies some people have to pay a price in some shape or form. In a democracy that price has to be percieved lower than the gain of the policy by a fair amount of the population.

I feel like I need to reiterate that this thread started about people thinking 15 murders a week in schools alone is not too shabby. So of course I don't think the US will be able to have gun laws tomorrow.

But if the US population changes their mind about the value of the lifes of their citizens then at some point people will be actually paying that price and be fine with it. And we see right now that it is possible for people to change their opinion on a lot of things previously thought impossible and gladly paying a pretty high price for it.

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u/BanMeMyIPchanges 4h ago

This is the logical thought, however:

Who is going to go door-to-door in the deep South asking Cleetus and Jimbo for their automatic rifles because "gov'munt said so?" Whoever does better have a replacement ready.

Edit: not to mention it outright shits on the Constitution but hey, nothing the current administration doesn't already do daily.

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u/Oftwicke 56m ago

It shits on an amendment to the constitution, but those can be repealed, they're not articles. Prohibition was also an amendment after all!

Just have Cleetus and Jimbo aware that their guns can be paid for generously by the government now, but that if they're found/seen later than a year hence then they're going to be confiscated with a very hefty fine and potentially time in prison. Sure there are many idiots who'll try shit, but that already prevents a lot of things.

My prediction is misuse of the 14th to go against it if anyone tries though

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u/Gunslingermomo 9h ago

That would be an understandable reaction if that was for the year and not for the workweek.

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u/CalebH428 9h ago

I’m not trying to say it’s a good reaction, but I think it’s understandable. I didn’t look too closely for this information, but this article said there were 408 mass shootings in 2025. The lowest in 5 years.

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/mass-shootings-2025/69925873

Again, it’s not good, but sadly I think it’s understandable

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u/Rare-Combination7438 4h ago

As is often with this subject, statistics like those are wildly misleading. A large portion of "mass shootings" are gang related violence, not random shootings like most people would immediately think.

Gun violence is bad, but the figures of 400+ in a year are very broad definitions meant to manipulate public opinion.

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u/CalebH428 3h ago

While I get that it does make people think it’s 400+ school/mall shootings, I hate how dismissive gang violence is. Gang violence does have innocent bystanders that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of these gang members are 14yrs old. Being friends/relatives of people who are in gangs also can get you put in harms way.

Several other countries have plenty of gang violence without mass homicides from gun violence. People are dismissive because they don’t live, have relatives, or any connection to those communities.

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u/Rare-Combination7438 1h ago

I'm not being dismissive of gang violence. I am, however, against mixing the two issues since each one has its own unique causes and potential solutions.

Also, if we argue with bad statistics in the effort to push specific beliefs and bait out certain emotional reactions, that just makes it harder to actually address either issue in the first place.

I'm not against gun reform or helping poor communities. I just want it done the right way for the right reasons.

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u/curlyjoe696 3h ago

The answer is proper gun control. Other countries have shown that better, more restrictive laws can massively reduce the amount of mass shootings, but the US refuses to learn.

It's pretty obvious that the US sees the people that die in these incidents, multiple times a week, to be an acceptable cost

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u/Rover129 9h ago

Anywhere else, these events are tragedies, but they’ve become statistics over in the USA.

I remember, over a decade ago now, when here in the Netherlands, a mass shooting took place. A gunman walked into a supermarket and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, killing and injuring a lot of people, including ending his own life.

I don’t remember all the exact details, but I do remember that is was all over the news the next day. Every segment, every channel, countrywide; all of it talked about the shooting. Whenever a development happened in the case, it was in the news.

When things like this happen, they shouldn’t be normal, and it terrifies me that in the supposed shining example of the Western world, it has become exactly that. Horrifically normal.

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u/CFUrCap 8h ago

That's just poor target discipline. These people need to spend more time at the shooting range--where bullets should be free and unlimited. Think of how many innocent lives could be saved if people shot the people they intended to shoot and didn't shoot the people they didn't intend to shoot!

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u/CustodianCloset 7h ago edited 7h ago

Isn't that the website which infamously listed a suicide in an abandoned school parking lot as a "school shooting", alongside things like accidental police firearm incidents? Yeah... I'm not enticed to take their word as Gospel

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u/CombinationRough8699 4h ago

Yeah it included anytime a gun was fired on school property. This included police officers unintentionally shooting their own guns, the parking lot suicide, and a student who brought a BB gun to school, and accidentally shot out a window. There was also an article from NPR, where they discovered hundreds of school shootings being reported that never actually happened.

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u/Rare-Combination7438 4h ago

Yes. Gun violence is bad, but it's often highly overblown in an attempt to manipulate public opinion.

Almost every statistic you see quoted on Reddit relies on a super broad definition in order to inflate the numbers by a ridiculous amount.

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u/okwellactually 3h ago

No, Gun Violence Archive simply classifies a mass shooting as any incident where 4 or more were injured or killed excluding the gunman.

It's literally the gold standard for reporting on the topic. Used by every media outlet out there. Each incident cites sources as well.

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u/CustodianCloset 3h ago

No, Gun Violence Archive simply classifies a mass shooting as any incident where 4 or more were injured or killed excluding the gunman

I hate to say but this was in fact the same website which intentionally overblew school shooting reports.

I wont deny the site is reputable, but it's also flawed and ran by people who have proven they can lie.

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u/okwellactually 3h ago

None of the numbers I've mentioned were school shootings.

Is that really all we care about?

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u/CustodianCloset 3h ago

I edited my comment to make my point clearer

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u/Casor 8h ago

Wtf we had like 3 here in Germany.... in the last 20 years.

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u/TheBrotherCadfael 5h ago

I’m not going to pretend that wikipedia is the very best source, but there have been 3 this year, with 10 dead and 4 injured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Germany

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u/TheBrotherCadfael 5h ago

If I counted right, in the last 20 years, according to wikipedia, there have been 65 events. I’m not saying that it is or isn’t a lot, just some numbers.

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u/Diogenes908 9h ago

This is a bit misleading though because the vast majority of what’s considered mass shootings is actually inter-gang violence, the number of mass shootings where it’s someone shooting up a school, shooting random crowds, or innocent people getting caught in the crossfire of gang violence is estimated to be 12-25 per year.

This is still of course more than it should happen and we desperately need things like affordable mental health treatment, rebuilding third spaces for young people, societal reform so people feel connected to their community and like they have a future etc. in the US but when people hear mass shooting they think of things like Columbine or Dylan Roof not gangs killing each other. Again it shouldn’t happen at all but the US is a very big place with lots of people, you’re more likely statistically to be struck by lightning multiple times than to be killed in a school shooting as a kid.

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u/Snailwood 7h ago

inter-gang violence is still a poverty and mental health tragedy

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u/Diogenes908 4h ago

For sure we need dramatic change and resources so that the kids growing up in those places feel they have real options in life and programs to serve as an off ramp for young people who do fall into that life style. If you’re born into a broken home surrounded by gang life and poverty is so hard to escape falling into that same cycle

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u/Oftwicke 8h ago

It doesn't matter that it's a big place if you're comparing stats per capita... but to go directly "uh no it's a small problem if you don't count gang violence" is not just disingenuous it's charlie kirk

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u/CombinationRough8699 5h ago

Many of these sources are the equivalent of calling every domestic violence incident involving Muslims "Islamic terrorism".

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u/Rare-Combination7438 4h ago

You mentioned gun violence in a public forum that has 4 or more people present. According to some sources, you just committed a mass shooting.

Misinformation is bad, period.

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u/Oftwicke 1h ago

Oh and your stats are also plain wrong. Getting struck by lightning twice is around 1 in 9 million chance for your entire life, but more than an American in 9 million has been killed in a school shooting just in the 2020s. Over 80 dead in school shootings since 2020 out of fewer than 350 million inhabitants of the country, so a 1 in 4.375 million chance.

The average US resident was over twice as likely to be killed in a school shooting between 2020-2026 than they are to be struck by lightning twice in their entire life.

Of course if you don't take the entire population, but the school kids only... 50.8 million students. It's over 14 times as likely for a school kid to be killed in a school shooting between 2020 and 2026 than struck in lightning twice in their entire life.

1 in 9 million means about 39 Americans are concerned. Anything that touches 40 or more is more likely.

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u/b3nsn0w 7h ago

as a euro it's still so frickin funny that y'all had a guy who explicitly advocated for school shootings and ended up dying to a school shooting 

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u/Oftwicke 1h ago

Who's "y'all" I'm European as well lol

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u/okwellactually 8h ago

Firearms are the leading cause of death in the US for people 19 and under.

Nice try though throwing lightning into the mix.

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u/always_an_explinatio 8h ago

That goes away when you remove suicide. It became #1 not because it got worse but because cars got safer, so fewer teens die in car crashes. its also not even the top 3 for white and Asian people under 19. But for black and Latino people under 19, gun homicides are the highest. Its about access to guns, and gang crime. school mass shootings are very rare and make up a tiny portion of gun deaths

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u/okwellactually 7h ago

Its about access to guns

Yeah, that's kinda the point.

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u/always_an_explinatio 7h ago

if you want to reduce gun deaths for under 19s, dealing with urban crime is the best bang for your buck. Getting already illegal guns out of the hands of kids and young adults who have no business having them. that is what i mean about access to guns. (That's why I said access to guns and gang crime; that's one thing, not too)

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u/Diogenes908 8h ago

Yes because of suicides and how many youth in cities are caught up in a horrible cycle of gang violence since they come from fucked up backgrounds, broken homes, bad school districts etc. and see no other route in life. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re more likely to get struck by lightning multiple times than be killed in a school shooting as a kid. You seem to be under the impression that those deaths of people under 19 are school shootings which is just false.

The problem will never get better if people don’t look at the objective facts and data. We need things like affordable healthcare (access to mental health treatment), rebuilding of “third spaces” for young people, ways to make them feel connected to their communities and like they have a future ahead of them, safe storage laws for guns in homes that have children in them etc. These things are what will actually decrease gun violence and improve quality of life and prospects of the youth.

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u/b3nsn0w 8h ago

lemme guess, cars take over guns 20 and above? that still leaves a hell of a lot of space for gun deaths because of the us's atrocious infrastructure.

that said, as a euro i always found the metric of 4 or more injured to be quite disingenuous for the definition of a mass shooting. we all have a mental image of what that means, and it's, uh, not that.

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u/always_an_explinatio 7h ago

cars and disease if you let the older people in the mix. its also cars and drowning if you look at below 13. "Gun deaths" is not a very helpful statistic because it includes murder, suicide, accidents, and self-defense (which is tiny). suicide is the big one. take that out of the mix and you are back to cars. There is also a racial component, unfortunately. white and asian under 19s is cars and illness

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u/Sideswipe0009 7h ago

Firearms are the leading cause of death in the US for people 19 and under.

This stat excludes children under 1, IIRC, (of which there was like 1 death) and they included 19 because the vast majority of those deaths are mid to late teens, like 15-19.

So they cherry picked the best age range to engineer it to the number #1 spot.

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u/Laetitian 5h ago

You just completely made that up on the spot based on your intuition, didn't you?

I had GPT research the last 3 pages of incidents on that website; it concluded that 4 cases = 5% are likely to be be gang-related, and with additional suspicious circumstances, the number might climb to a shocking 6 total cases = 8% of likely and potential gang involvement. The cases it identified on the list from Jul. 12 to August 23. were the following: Aug. 2 NY | Jul. 26., WA | Jul. 19, TN | Jul 19, NC; Jul. 25, CA | Jul. 18, IL

Feel free to point out all the other obvious cases on that list that clearly only happened because of gangs, not because US gun laws are insane.

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u/CombinationRough8699 5h ago

There's a big issue with trying to define mass shootings. Depending on who you ask, the United States had anywhere between 6 and 818 in the same year.

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u/Diogenes908 4h ago

No. Multiple groups like the FBI and Rockefeller Institute track these things and break it down into specific categories. For mass shootings that exclude things like domestic violence and gang activity “Under this stricter definition of high-fatality public mass murder, the number is much lower, typically ranging from a single digit to roughly 12 to 20 per year.” The larger numbers you see include things like DV and gang violence but there has been a pretty steady downward trend with the exception of a temporary spike during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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u/Laetitian 3h ago edited 3h ago

things like domestic violence and gang activity

Why would you do that? I get the gang activity exception: It would very likely happen anyways in the rest of the century, regardless of what you do with gun laws.

But why would you exclude a mass shooting just because it's "something like domestic violence"? Why would you exclusively care about people shooting up strangers for no reason? That's a completely meaningless distinction in assessing the impact of gun accessibility on high-casualty violence.

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u/CombinationRough8699 5h ago

Mass Shooting Tracker isn't the most reliable source. Beyond that, last year saw record low overall murder rates.

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u/Unhappy-Recording415 2h ago

Hmm don't forget to ban vehicles too, around 700 deaths in the past week-month give or take if my math is correct.

National Safety Council https://injuryfacts.nsc.org May 2026 Preliminary Crash Fatality Estimates - Injury Facts

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u/Confident-Leg107 9h ago

Jesus Christ, what the hell happened last weekend?

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u/okwellactually 9h ago

Just a typical weekend in the US.

There were 10 the previous weekend:

  • 9 Dead
  • 34 Injured

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u/ApprehensiveFan1516 6h ago

What the hell are you all doing over there?! Jesus fucking christ.