In the wake of the tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether mass shootings in the United States are on the rise. Some sources argue that mass shootings are on the rise, while others argue that the rate has stayed more-or-less constant.
Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined was recently interviewed by CNN. When asked whether incidents such as the Sandy Hook massacre represent a real rise in mass shootings, he responded:
It’s not clear whether we’re seeing a real uptick, or just a cluster of events that are more or less distributed at random. You’ve got to remember – random events will occur in clusters just by sheer chance. So we don’t really know whether the fact that there are many of them in the year 2012 represents a trend or just a very unlucky year.
In this article, I’d like to use data available online to address this question.
I recently wrote a post about randomness and rare events. The main lesson from that article is that randomness isn’t the same thing as uniformity. For example, if on average, sharks attack swimmers 3 times a year, then just by chance, you will expect to see years in which no swimmers are attacked, and years in which 7 swimmers are attacked. To our eyes, streaks like this don’t seem random. But, as I argue in my previous post, we are typically not good judges of randomness. In particular, we vastly underestimate the likelihood of such streaks. And so the question is, how can you test whether a set of events is random?
