The frequency with which mass shootings have occurred over the past thirty years punctuate time in America: while only a small part of gun violence in America, such shootings have been described as setting new thresholds for public violence, and register a new scale of the public use of automatic firearms. While there is no clear consensus on tabulating these crimes, their impact challenges clear visualization. Yet they may be mapped less in terms of ownership of guns, than the mistaken association of gun-use and liberty. The Persistent mistaken beliefs in gun-ownership as a form of freedom and expressive act recur in these incidents, in however bizarre a form, that raise eyebrows over the public safety of mistakenly defining gun ownership as a freedom. While we often turn to maps to explain the scale and frequency of mass shootings, frustrated by the difficulty in summing up or aggregating their violence, the unpredictability of their occurrence challenges the possibilities of their visualization in troubling ways.
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