Mass shootings are a fraction of gun deaths. Why don't we pay more attention to the rest?

After Wednesday's mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, America is once again embroiled in a debate about gun violence. Many Americans and people abroad are wondering, rightly, why this seems to happen so often in the US.

Americans are right to be horrified. There is simply no rational explanation for the violence that killed 14 people and wounded 21 more on Wednesday — or the type of violence that killed 26 victims, including 20 children, nearly three years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

But as abhorrent as mass shootings are, Americans too often turn a blind eye to the type of gun violence that kills thousands more people each month and about 92 people, on average, every day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in 2013 alone, 33,636 people died in firearm deaths. Based on the Mass Shooting Tracker, 502 of those deaths were from mass shootings.

Again, this is not to say that Americans shouldn't care about mass shootings. We absolutely should. They are appalling and unnecessary, occurring far too often and terrorizing communities.

But it seems like all too often, the form of gun violence that occurs every day goes ignored — even as mass shootings continue getting enormous amounts of (justified) attention.

Thousands of deaths go largely ignored each year

Most gun deaths in the United States (21,175 of 33,636 in 2013) are suicides. And most non-suicide deaths (11,208) are homicides. The rest are classified as accidents and police shootings. Among these deaths, about 502 people in 2013 were killed in mass shootings — far too many, but less than 1.5 percent of all gun deaths in the US. And while it's true that homicide rates have plummeted in the past couple of decades, America's abhorrent level of gun violence remains an extraordinary outlier among developed countries.

We know that many of the everyday gun deaths are preventable. The research, helpfully aggregated by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, shows that after controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. The research is actually a bit weaker for mass shootings — in large part because such tragedies are, thankfully, somewhat rare, so they're difficult to study. But the basic point is that we know restricting access to guns — and, better yet, confiscating guns — could help prevent thousands of gun deaths.

Still, talk about passing gun control laws only seems to come in response to about 1.5 percent of all gun deaths — the mass shootings — even though we know that all gun deaths are preventable. It's just that the other types of gun violence largely go ignored in public discourse.

That's not for a lack of trying to bring attention to the issue. I've written several articles about everyday gun deaths, and I can tell you that they get considerably less attention than articles about mass shootings. I have heard similar complaints from other journalists. And advocacy organizations like the Violence Policy Center try time and time again to shine a light on these deaths with all types of reports and studies.

Yet these other gun deaths don't just get little attention compared with mass shootings — they get almost no attention at all. Look, for instance, at the Google search trends for "shootings" — all the major spikes are related to mass or school shootings:

It's intuitive that mass shootings get more attention. As particularly deadly events, mass shootings are intended to draw more attention, whether the goal is to terrorize or to garner infamy.

But even though it might make sense to pay more attention to mass shootings, that doesn't justify the lack of attention that goes to everyday gun violence.

Why does everyday gun violence go ignored?

It's hard to say exactly why Americans seem so apathetic to more typical gun violence, but there are a few potential reasons.

For suicides, there is still a lot of stigma about these deaths, particularly that they are somehow the victim's fault. But as Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously told me, these deaths are often impulsive, driven by mental health problems, and enabled by access to guns — all things that could be addressed by public policy.

For homicides, one big factor seems to be that the everyday shootings happen out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, since so many occur in poor, black, urban communities. In 2013, for example, more than 51 percent of homicide victims (75 percent of whom were killed by guns) were black, according to the FBI.

But except for some occasional local news coverage and political pontificating about black-on-black crime, these deaths rarely get much media coverage, and the public rarely seems to care. And it's hard to ignore the racial element here: The majority of Americans are white, and it's possible they might simply care less about black victims — we know, after all, that subconscious biases make white Americans more likely to perceive black people as less innocent and as criminals, which may, in some people's minds, make these victims more deserving of the gun violence in their communities.

A more charitable explanation is that the more typical kind of gun violence invokes more complicated problems. While it's easy to immediately associate a mass shooting with access to guns and (somewhat incorrectly) mental health issues, a shooting in a poor black community raises all sorts of systemic issues with long, complicated histories — residential segregation, economic inequality, racial disparities in the criminal justice system and education, and so on. It is a lot harder to explain how to solve these many problems than it is to simply suggest less access to guns and more access to mental health care services.

Or perhaps Americans are just numb to this kind of gun violence, since it happens all too frequently. But that's a tragedy by itself: Once we accept these types of deaths, it becomes easier for them to keep occurring.

Regardless, all of this has real effects: When the public cares little about gun violence, lawmakers and even police are going to care less, too. As journalist Jill Leovy argued in her recent book Ghettoside, police appear to engage in the same kind of apathy as the public. In Los Angeles, for example, the elite homicide unit — the robbery-homicide division — typically focuses on celebrity cases, massacres, and arson murders, but rarely pays any attention to black-on-black violence, leaving it instead to understaffed local divisions. And this is typical in the US: Investigations have found, for instance, that black homicides are less likely to be solved than those that involve white victims.

The focus exclusively on mass shootings also has another effect: Since attention on these events comes and goes fairly quickly, discussions about serious reforms tend to fade away quite quickly as well. But if we focused on all gun violence, we couldn't do that — public attention on the daily occurrence of dozens of tragedies would make the problem impossible to ignore.

But apathy is where we are today. Even as Americans express horror at the mass shooting happening in some other state or city, we by and large ignore the gun violence in our backyards. So it keeps going — multiple times an hour every single day.