Another shooting - Catholic priest murdered.

[Borgholio]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/priest-killed- ... d=24101218

A priest was killed and another was injured in a shooting at a Catholic church in Phoenix Wednesday, police told ABC News.

The shooting happened around 9 p.m. local time at the Mother of Mercy Mission Catholic Church in downtown Phoenix, Phoenix Police Sgt. Steve Martos said.

Martos said police responded to a burglary call at the church.

The crime scene was inside the church’s living quarters, not in the sanctuary, Martos said.

Authorities are continuing to look for suspects. A car missing from the shooting scene -- a Mazda Tribute -- was located nearby with no one inside, he said.

Either this is a bad month for shootings, or the news is jumping on every gun-related crime that they can and making a trend out of it.

[Dominus Atheos]

According to the CDC (which was the first result when I typed "gun deaths per year"), there are 11,078 gun deaths every year, which comes out to 30 per day.

This sounds incredibly callous, but I don't think it's worth posting unless at least 3-5 people die in the same incident.

[Borgholio]

Yeah you're probably right. This is tragic but not a mass murder.

[RogueIce]

For all we know it was a burglary gone bad, not something one would normally think of as a "mass/spree shooting" which gets the headlines. Granted they don't normally happen at churches, which is probably why this is getting more attention than the many other times something like this probably happens.

[Iroscato]

Perhaps a 'General shooting incident thread' is needed. I also don't want to sound callous, but this is a very current topic and it may be good to keep this madness archived in one place for future reference?

[A-Wing_Slash]

Relatedly, anyone know a good source that tracks numbers of gun deaths as they are reported, perhaps on a day to day basis? I saw some stuff like that, aggregating all us gun deaths, after Newtown, but that's long enough ago now that all that stuff is now sliding off into the history books.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Relatedly, anyone know a good source that tracks numbers of gun deaths as they are reported, perhaps on a day to day basis? I saw some stuff like that, aggregating all us gun deaths, after Newtown, but that's long enough ago now that all that stuff is now sliding off into the history books.

More importantly, would that source also bother to differentiate between suicides and homicides? The same CDC source that Dominus Atheos mentions also states that there were 19,392 suicides by firearm for all of 2010 (roughly 53-54 per day).

[A-Wing_Slash]

The last time I looked into the numbers, I remember seeing something along the lines of the traditionally cited high levels of gun homocide in urban areas, but counterbalanced by disproportionately higher rates of accidental gun deaths in rural areas. Wasn't enough to equalize the numbers, but adding the two together put both populations in the same ballpark. Not sure how those counted suicides, guess I should look that all back up.

[Andras]

The total of firearm related accidental deaths is a tiny fraction of gun homicides or suicides however (606 in 2010; CDC). Accidental gun deaths in rural areas includes nearly all hunting accidents, since you won't get many of those in urban areas. There were more justifiable homicides then fatal gun accidents in 2010.

In 2010, gun suicide was 19,392 compared to 18,972 non gun suicide (CDC)
In 2010, gun homicide was 11,078 per CDC, 8,775 per FBI.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cr ... rtbl11.xls

Of US States, Louisiana and Maryland led the way in murder rates in 2010, conversely 12 states had both an overall murder rate of 2.0/100k or less AND a firearms murder rate of 1.0/100k or less.

In 2010, of 13,941 murders and non-negligent manslaughter cases reported to the FBI, 10,735 (77%) were reported in all cities combined, Cities of 250k or more population had roughly two to three times the murder rate of smaller cities, with cities between 100k and 249,999 pop half the rate of the larger cities, and cities under 100k roughly halved again.