Will a mass shooting event affect me in 2024?
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resolved Jul 1
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This is a question I ask myself every time there is a mass shooting headline so I could use a fair prediction.

I live in the Seattle area and have two school age kids. I have a normally sized circle of friends.

I’ll define a mass shooting event as an event involving killing or injuring 2+ people using guns.

An event that occurs in my city or area I frequent would count as affecting me. An event that kills or injures family or friends regardless of where they are in the US would count as affecting me.

If you have other clarifying questions ask in the comments.

I will not bet on this market.

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What city do you live in? How big is "area I frequent"?

Seattle metro area.

Well ok, but when you say metro area, and say "in my city" above, it seems to matter if you're actually in Seattle city limits vs Shoreline or Bellevue or Renton.

There were 2 shootings injuring 2 people each in Seattle earlier this month. https://mynorthwest.com/3961576/4-people-including-2-juveniles-injured-separate-seattle-shootings-saturday/
But since you didn't resolve the market, you either didn't hear of the incidents, or you don't consider them to be part of "your city". Either way, it doesn't seem like gun violence is the broader Seattle area is affecting you that much.

Yeah I'm only trying to track mass shooting events not all gun violence. Generally it's defined as shootings where there are 4+ victims.

You defined it as killing/injuring two people.

Oh I see. For 'my area' I would say Lynwood is about as far North as I normally go, Tukwila as far south, and Carnation/Snoqualmie as far East. About this area of the map.

That's an error on my part. I had intended on using the most common definition although even that is hard to pin down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions

Grumbles You can't just say you're going to use one standard as a definition and then not use it, especially since the original language was not an obvious typo.
Shootings follow an exponential decay pattern, meaning there are waay more 2 victim shootings than 4 victim shootings.

And, as an aside, the exponential decay means that there are way more "gangbanger flails his gun into a crowd, injuring four but killing none" than their are "disturbed kid brings an AR15 to school, killing dozens". The first type of incident gets tallied into "mass shooting" statistics to mislead people into thinking the second type of incident happens hundreds of time per year. In reality, the modal mass shooting has zero or one fatality, with nonfatal injuries bringing it into "mass shooting" definition. When I looked at the 2022 data there were actually more "mass shootings" then there were deaths from mass shootings, meaning the average "mass shooter" killed less than one person. I haven't analyzed the 2023 data though.

No need to grumble. @mods can you please cancel the question due to my error?