Mass murders always get people talking, but the fact is that we could never have another mass murder in this country and it wouldn't affect the gun violence statistics even slightly. From Wikipedia: People care about sensationalism, they don't care about gun violence. They just mistake their sensationalist bloodlust for an anti-violence position. 27 or so people were murdered in this incident, but we average 34 gun murders, and 143 intentional gun woundings every single day. If people actually cared about violence they would have this "outrage" every day.In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm. There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.
I think a fair amount of us do, but the media playing up these incidents makes it an appropriate time to be able to bring it to the people's attention. That's another piece of the puzzle: our media perceptions. The US media is so warped and inaccurately and disproportionately displayed coupled with Americans reliance on it and its infalliability that if we aren't seeing and hearing about the outrage over this every day it simply doesn't exist in the eyes of the general population. Also those are always astounding numbers to me. 34 gun murders per day in America as opposed to the stats someone posted below of Japan's 11 gun murders per year.