Missouri: 4.7% does 52% of all mass shootings

Note: We have lowered the Saint Louis rate slightly since originally publishing this. We discovered that Gun Violence Archive had grouped some suburban mass shootings in with Sant Louis, using a different convention than they use with other major cities. However, even with the correction, Saint Louis still accounts for over half of all mass shootings in the sate.

Researchers at the University of Colorado examined all mass shootings from 2014-2022 to find each state’s mass shooting rate based on a nine-year average. They used the Gun Violence Archive as their source.

We found a strong correlation between the rate of mass shootings and the Black percentage of each state. Of the ten states with the highest mass shootings rate, eight were also in the top ten highest for the Black percentage of the population.

Missouri was ranked 6th for the highest mass shooting rate but only 19th for the highest Black percentage. We decided to dig deeper using the same data set used by the researchers at UC.

Only 4.7% of the population of Missouri lives in Saint Louis. However, this population is committing 58% of mass shootings.

If Saint Louis and Kansas City were their own state, they would rank number one in mass shootings by a very high margin. If you take the 87% of the population of Missouri that lives outside of Saint Louis of Kansas City, then Missouri would only be in 34th place.

In our chart, we used mass shootings per 1000k because this is what the researchers at UC used. Normally, this website used per 100k to express homicide rates. Saint Louis had an average of 2.56 mass shootings per 100k. This is more than the homicide rates of some entire states, such as Utah, Idaho, Maine, Vermont, and others.