A new survey titled “Exposure to Mass Shootings in the United States: A National Survey” and published in March 7th issue of the journal JAMA Network Open claims that approximately 6.95% of U.S. adults reported having been present at the scene of a mass shooting (18.37 million), and about 2.18% sustained injuries during such incidents (5.76 million). There were 264.3 million adults in the US in July 1, 2024. The beginning of the paper starts by stating: “Mass shootings, defined as incidents where 4 or more people are shot with a firearm, have become a significant public health concern in the US.” But the survey questions have little relationship to that definition.
This study was concerned with direct exposure to mass shootings, which were defined as “gun-related crimes where 4 or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or place of worship.” This definition was a compromise between the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass public shooting and the Gun Violence Archive’s mass shooting definition, designed to be inclusive of individuals who were injured and accessible to the public.“Exposure to Mass Shootings in the United States: A National Survey,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, March 7, 2025.
The problem with this survey is that the questions weren’t asked in a way that allows one to compare their numbers to the Congressional Research Service or Gun Violence Archives, so we hired McLaughlin & Associates to ask more detailed questions of 1,000 respondents on April 29, 2025.
Their question is: “Have you personally ever been physically present on the scene of a mass shooting in your lifetime?” Instead, our first question asks: Have you personally ever been physically present on the scene of a mass shooting where four or more people have been shot in a public place in your lifetime? This question is exactly what the CRS definition reflects and should give us a number less than that shown by the GVA numbers show because we limit it to public places. The 7.8% who said that they had been present for such an attack, implying 20.62 million people, similar to the 18.37 the SPPE finds. But our survey question more clearly asks the number of people shot.
Big problems are the SPPE survey doesn’t ask people when the attack occurred, whether it was in a public place, nor exactly how people were hurt. Still our numbers on the total number of people present is within 12% of the SPPE survey estimate.
Our survey indicates that 11.6 million of the 20.62 million occurred in the last ten years — 56.4%. And about 1.38 million (11.9% of those present at the attacks).
The GVA has data over the eleven years from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2023. They claimed that there were 4,679 of these attacks, with 19,352 victims shot (there were another 186 suspects). (However, note that these cases include instances where fewer than four people were shot.) It is now possible for us to compare the number of victims shot in the survey (1.38 million) to the 19,352, with the survey claiming that 71.3 times more victims shot than the GVA claims occurred. Given that the GVA numbers don’t limit mass shootings to public places, the survey question should be biased towards giving a number that is low compared to the GVA numbers, but instead it is 71.3 times higher.
As to the cross-tabs on the McLaughlin & Associates survey, 61.9% of men were present at mass shootings compared to 38.1% of women. Republican men were more likely than Republican women to be present (54.9% to 45.1%) and the reverse was true for Democrats (43.1% of men and 56.9% for women).
