MASS shootings incident in the United States have surpassed the 500 mark over the weekend.
This grim milestone was recorded by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which said the U.S. averages almost two mass shootings a day.
The 500th incident this year was recorded on Sunday when the Denver Police Department posted an alert on X, formerly known as Twitter.
This incident involved a mass shooting that left five people injured.
Hours later, an El Paso Police report said that they opened an investigation following a shooting that killed a 19-year-old teenager and left five more people injured, bringing the number of mass shootings in the U.S. to 501.
GVA defines a mass shooting as an incident in which 4 or more people are shot and either injured or killed, not including the shooter.
Meanwhile, the recent annual crime and safety report released by the National Center For Education Studies revealed 188 school shootings in the 2021 to 2022 school year.
The year 2021, however, recorded the highest number of mass shootings in U.S. history, with 689 reported incidents, while 2022 saw 647 cases of mass shootings.
The United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, owns 46 percent of the world’s civilian guns.
The U.S. Constitution’s second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, and about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun according to the Pew Research Center.
However, the U.S. ranks first in the world in terms of both individual gun ownership and cases of mass shooting incidents.
However, the gun ownership issue remains divisive in the United States.
Pew Research Center said that Americans are evenly split over whether gun ownership does more to increase or decrease safety.
About 49% say it does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, but an equal share say gun ownership does more to reduce safety by giving too many people access to firearms and increasing misuse.
79% of Republicans say that gun ownership does more to increase safety, while a nearly identical share of democrats (78%) say that it does more to reduce safety.
