In his address to the nation after the Charleston attack, Obama claimed: “We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Earlier in the week he spoke of the “unique mayhem that gun violence afflicts upon this nation”. Another claim by Obama from last Friday: “You don’t see murder on this kind of scale, with this kind of frequency, in any other advanced nation on Earth.”
Senator Harry Reid made a similar statement on June 23rd: “The United States is the only advanced country where this type of mass violence occurs.”
Mass public shootings are defined as incidents that occur in the absence of other criminal activity (robberies, drug deals, et cetera) in which a gun was used to kill four or more victims at a public location within a 24-hour period.
Liberals like to toss around the “fact” that mass public shootings only occur in the United States because of our lax attitudes on gun ownership. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Nine of the worst 13 public mass shootings, including the top three, occurred outside the US.
1) Utoya, Norway, July 22, 2011: Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated.
2) Sousse, Tunisia, June 26, 2015: Seifeddine Rezgui, a college student, used a gun to kill 39 people at a crowded tourist beach resort at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel.
3) Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia, April 28 and 29, 1996: Martin Bryant killed 35 people and wounded another 23 at a popular tourist site, the historic Port Arthur former prison colony.
4) Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 by gun fire at Virginia Tech University.
5) Hebron, Israel, February 25, 1994: Baruch Goldstein killed 29 and wounded 125 Muslim worshippers in an attack on the Cave of the Patriarchs.
6) Newtown, Connecticut, USA, December 14, 2012: 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
7) Killeen, Texas, USA, October 16, 1991: George Hennard crashed his pickup truck into the plate glass windows of the Luby Cafeteria and then shot 23 people to death.
8) San Ysidro, California, USA July 18, 1984: James Huberty shot and killed 21 people and wounded another 19 at a McDonald’s restaurant.
9) Erfurt, Germany, April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhäuser, a recent graduate of the Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany, killed 18 people.
10) Near Stirling, Scotland, UK, March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton killed 17 people at the Dunblane Primary School.
11) Hungerford, UK, August 19, 1987: Michael Robert Ryan killed 16 people, but they occurred at several locations.
12) São Gonçalo do Amarante, Natal, Brazil, May 21, 1997: Genildo Ferreira Do Francais killed 15 people in a small northern Brazilian town.
13) Winnenden, Germany, March 11, 2009: 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer 15 killed at the Winnenden School.
Many of the above countries have gun control laws that are far stricter than anything that could ever be passed here, yet they didn’t stop the shooter.
Mass public shootings are terrible no matter where they happen. But saying they only happen in the U.S. is not true.