Mass Shootings

You are more likely to die in a mass shooting than to win the Powerball drawing, but the truth is that you are not going to do either. That does not stop people from buying lottery tickets, and it does not stop people from fearing being killed in spectacular acts of terrorism.
It is true that guns kill tens of thousands of Americans every year—the majority of them from suicide. Of the fraction that are homicides, only a vanishingly small fraction of those are high profile mass shootings of the type that make people fear to go to office parties, or to movie theaters. If gun violence itself is what you fear, the most prudent action you can take is to not have a gun in your home.

Good grief this Hamilton Nolan essay in Gawker, You Will Not Die In A Mass Shooting, is all the things I've been thinking for the last few days.

You are far more likely to die driving to the movie theater than you are to die by being killed by a mass shooter at the movie theater.

This kind of thing is why people are more afraid of airplanes than automobiles.
It’s also why I’m lukewarm about assault-weapon bans. Now a handgun ban would do a LOT of things -- mostly suicide prevention. But fairly few people are killed with any sort of long guns. (Although it’s possible that psychologically mass shooters are drawn to so-called “assault weapons” and that eliminating them might reduce mass killings, but nobody’s allowed to do any research on that so...)