Crypto World
The Death Toll of a Mass Shooting Doesn’t End at the Scene
The result was sobering. On the day after the 10 mass shootings with the most fatalities, traffic deaths rose by an average of 14.3%, about 20 additional deaths nationwide. Put another way, the extra deaths on the road equaled roughly 75% of the number of people killed in the shootings themselves.
Any surprising result invites an obvious question: Could it be a coincidence? To find out, we repeated the analysis 10,000 times, substituting fake, random dates for the dates of mass shootings. A spike as large as the one we observed arose only once in 10,000 iterations, making it clear that our findings were highly unlikely to have occurred by chance. The increase held across nearly every kind of driver, region, and weather condition, and it persisted even in states far from the shooting, which argues against local explanations like road closures or emergency response. And when we examined active-shooter incidents with no fatalities—events that drew much less public attention—we observed no rise in traffic deaths.
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