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More U.S. children die in mass shootings at home than at school - study

By Brad Brooks

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Three out of four U.S. children and teenagers killed in mass shootings over the past decade were victims of domestic violence and generally died in their homes, according to a study https://everytownresearch.org/massshootingsreports/mass-shootings-in-america-2009-2019 released on Thursday by the gun control group Everytown.

While the specter of school shootings looms darkly in the minds of American parents who remember massacres in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida, and around the country, the group's review of shootings from 2009 through 2018 found that far more children were killed in their own homes.

"These are not random acts of violence, yet people have the perception that the killings come out of nowhere," said Sarah Burd-Sharps, Everytown's research director. "That is simply not the truth."

The Everytown report, based on police and court records as well as media reports, found that 54% of mass shootings involved the shooter killing a family member or an intimate partner.

A total of 1,121 people were killed in 194 mass shootings in the decade examined, and one-third of those were children or teenagers.

Nearly two-thirds of all mass shootings took place entirely inside homes, the study found https://everytownresearch.org/massshootingsreports/mass-shootings-in-america-2009-2019.

Burd-Sharps said Everytown hoped its report would help the public gain more understanding about the statistical realities of mass shootings, which it defines as an incident in which at least four people are killed, excluding the shooter.

The federal government and other groups set a lower threshold for what constitutes a mass shooting. Those definitions can result in higher totals than Everytown's count.

Only 1% of the nearly 35,000 gun deaths averaged in the United States each year in the past decade involved mass shootings, but Burd-Sharps said she believed public interest in them could help propel gun-safety legislation that could cut gun deaths across the board.

At the top of Everytown's wish list was a "red flag" law that would allow family members or law enforcement officers to petition a judge to seize firearms from a person they think is a threat to themselves or others.

The group also believed a comprehensive federal law requiring background checks on all gun sales would quickly be effective in decreasing gun deaths.

The link between domestic violence in mass shootings was seen this week in San Diego, California, when a man who had a restraining order against him killed his wife and three of their four young sons before taking his own life.

"When you look at all these cases of kids who lost their lives, if some family member had been able to heed the warning signs and temporarily had guns removed from the home, many of those children would still be alive," Burd-Sharps said.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in New York; Editing by Scott Malone, Bill Berkrot and Bernadette Baum)