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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

It seems a misdirection to use median across years as we have averages available. It's more precise and more readable but probably doesn't align with the policies you want to push:

    Norway — 1.888
    Serbia — 0.381
    France — 0.347
    Macedonia — 0.337
    Albania — 0.206
    Slovakia — 0.185
    Switzerland — 0.142
    Finland — 0.132
    Belgium — 0.128
    Czech Republic — 0.123
    United States — 0.089
    Austria — 0.068
    Netherlands — 0.051
    Canada — 0.032
    England — 0.027
    Germany — 0.023
    Russia — 0.012
    Italy — 0.009

Same website: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

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Also from the same website

Many statisticians believe the reason the CRPC study's results seem so counterintuitive is that they are incorrect. One of the more detailed analyses appeared on the fact-checking website snopes.com and concluded that the CRPC report used “inappropriate statistical methods” which led to misleading results.

But how else would you make the US greater than zero and all the other countries zero?

"A more important oversight was the report's use of average deaths per capita instead of a more stable metric. Because of the smaller populations of most European countries, individual events in those countries had statistically oversized influence and warped the results. For example, Norway’s world-leading annual rate was due to a single devastating 2011 event, in which far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. Norway had zero mass shootings in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015."

On the contrary, median is a much better indication of central tendency here than mean. It is also not less "precise", both statistics are given to the same three decimal places here.

Brazil would have a 0.25 average. So much better than Norway! Can't argue against "more precise and more readable" data.

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