When number of shootings is 1, you are not actually doing useful statistics. It can easily be an aberration.

Mass shootings are almost by definition outliers

In USA, the measure "number of mass shootings per year" doesn't have real outliers, it has a reasonable number every year. In Norway, it's different, you get a streak of zeroes, followed by a 1.

Norway has __considerably__ lower population than the USA. There has to be normalization or your comparison is just bogus.

The comparison is bogus, because you can make the numbers arbitrarily high by subdividing into tiny areas and then conveniently ignoring all the places where they are zero.

Why not subdivide further and claim that Buskerud is a veritable warzone, compared to the whole of USA on average?

Sure, but that doesn't solve the original problem which is that you picked small population countries with number of shootings too low to do meaningful statistical analysis your way because any rare event will have an outsized effect.

There are however plenty of European countries with populations large enough to avoid this problem (Germany, France, Italy, UK...).

So why not compare the US to the EU or parts of it?

Which year is this for? The Finland numbers don't seem right at all.

Neither do the Norway ones.

The numbers are in fact so wrong that one has to seriously question the motivations of the author, it seems like this is a propaganda piece with made up numbers designed to make the US appear slightly less terrible.

The number from Norway is from a single mass shooting in 2011 where a man shot children trapped on an island. There have never been anything like that before or later. He killed more people than the total number of murder victims in an average year.

I'm well aware, but they still don't make sense in the context unless this is supposed to be a cherry picked list of worst years for each country.

I'm still not sure which events the Finland one refers to.

It lists the mass shootings between 2000 and 2014. Take a look at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/05/obama-gun-co... for more information.

The Finland events are obviously Jokela and Kauhajoki.

>The Finland events are obviously Jokela and Kauhajoki.

It's not that obvious with the 2009 Sello shooting being dropped out and the 2011 Utoya shooting being included.

Given the poor coverage it is very difficult to reverse engineer what this graph is supposed to portray without finding the original source.

The data appear to be correct. Maybe you’ve ingested to much propaganda to believe these numbers.

I’m always skeptical of statistics about highly politicized issues as the interpretations and sampling can be very irresponsible/biased.

The data is for a really arbitrary timespan, why 2000-2014?

It’s clearly missing data, Finland for example had more than two mass shootings during those years.

The numbers look bad because they are bad, they may however be bad for different reasons than I originally suggested.

It’s old I think.

I might try to dig up some more recent stuff.