No, there haven’t been 355 mass shootings this year

After yesterday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, a statistic started making the rounds on social media that claimed there have been 355 mass shootings this year in the U.S. That’s more than one mass shooting per day.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post making the allegation:

The San Bernardino shooting is the 355th mass shooting this year, according to a mass shooting tracker maintained by the Guns Are Cool subreddit. The Reddit tracker defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire.

Let that sink in: mass shootings in the U.S. now happen on a more-than-daily basis. The figure was then quoted by other news sites like PolicyMic, which has called for politicizing mass shootings in the past.

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