This image was removed due to legal reasons.

On June 17, 2015, a young white man named Dylann Roof walked into a majority-black church in Charleston, S.C., prayed with its parishioners, and then shot and killed nine of them.


One year later, almost nothing has changed with respect to how guns are treated in America. No legislation has passed in Congress to address gun control, and in many states gun possession has only been expanded by proposals like campus carry.

With the help of the Mass Shooting Tracker, Fusion has counted up mass shootings in the 12 months since the carnage in Charleston. We defined mass shootings as an incident in which at least four individuals were killed or injured.


In total, there have been 551 such incidents—more than one per day on average.

This image was removed due to legal reasons.

Perhaps the most important thing to note about these is how few of these events involved radicalized Muslims. We counted just three such incidents: Sunday's Orlando shooting, the San Bernardino shooting in December, and the shooting at the U.S. Navy Reserve center in Chattanooga that occurred just one month after Charleston.

In fact, the things the incidents most have in common is that they involve high-caliber firearms, and that most are committed in big cities, where the perpetrator is often never found. Indeed, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, every major American city except Austin has seen a mass shooting since 2013. The Trace, a gun violence news site, says that of the 30 Americans murdered by guns every day on average, about half are black men, who comprise just 6% of the population. Radicalized Muslims pose no more of a threat than radicalized whites like the Charleston shooter or radicalized pro-lifers like the man who killed three and injured nine at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood.


And these are only mass shootings. CDC data suggest that overall gun deaths now number 33,000 a year, or about 10 for every 100,000 people, a rate we seem to have come to view as acceptable after seeing a major decline in gun deaths in the late '90s. Americans are now as likely to die by a firearm as in a car accident.

This image was removed due to legal reasons.


"It’s the shootings taking place in parking lots, bars, schools, bedrooms, and street corners across America that are responsible for most gun injuries and deaths," The Trace says.

And as Vox has pointed out, mass shooting deaths actually represent less than 2% of all gun deaths that occur in the U.S.


Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.