I'd also like to know what their definition of an "active shooter incident" is. They specifically mention excluding cases relating to "gang or drug violence", but don't mention things like convenience store holdups, bank robberies, and domestic violence as being excluded. (At least some of those categories probably were; the numbers would be much higher otherwise.) It's obvious that what they mean is mass-shooting incidents like the one targeting Gabby Giffords, Newtown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, etc., but if that's the case, why didn't they just say "mass shooting incident"? Unless there are some incidents that they wanted to include that aren't included in the formal definition of "mass shooting"?
For example, the Clackamas Town Center shooter only managed to kill two people before the incident was ended by a citizen with a lawfully carried concealed weapon. As such, the crime doesn't meet the minimum number of casualties for a "mass killing", which is three, by the FBI's definition. But any reasonable person would look at that and say that a mass killing was what the perpetrator intended. Similarly, the incident that inspired the Boomtown Rats' song "I Don't Like Mondays" doesn't commonly appear on lists of mass shootings, either, because only two people died when the shooter shot at an elementary school playground from across the street.
Honestly, I smell cooked data, especially when you consider that a graph that goes back to 1980 and uses the FBI's definition of "mass shooting" doesn't show an upward trend:
http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/17/are-mass-shootings-becoming-more-common In fact, cherry-picking 2000-2014 seems tailor made for an argument in favor of reinstating the AWB.
Furthermore, I don't know why we're allowing mass-shooter incidents to drive public policy about guns. These incidents are extremely rare and the likelihood that you'll be involved in one is much smaller than the likelihood that you'll be a victim of domestic violence or ordinary violent street crime. They're like plane crashes. Everyone pays attention to plane crashes because they're rare, horrific incidents with dozens or hundreds of casualties. People fear flying, yet they don't fear the drive to the airport, although statistics show you're much more likely to get hurt or killed driving to the airport than flying.
(My cynical suspicion, of course, is that the antis, faced with the fact that street crime has been dropping nationwide for 20+ years after peaking in the early '90s, know that citing street crime as a reason for gun control is a dog that won't hunt. So they have to play up these mass-shooter incidents to gin up support.)
