Everyone old enough knows that guns are dangerous (ADDED: and we in the US gun community put a LOT of effort into this, e.g. https://eddieeagle.nra.org/ and have decreased fatal gun accidents from ~800 to ~600 per year in a period when both the population and number of guns owned by it increased by very roughly 50%).
Very few know that swallowing two or more small magnets can result in death in a few days, even with medical treatment, especially if the treatment is "too late". That's very much unlike other "small bits of metal", to which I'd include small ammunition (although the commonly unplated lead bullets in .22 LR ammo would add a lead exposure threat).
And then there's the little matter of the 2nd Amendment, we have no Constitutionally enshrined right to keep and bear small magnets, which are also fantastically less useful than guns.
For that matter, in the 1970's heyday of US gun control, the CPSC was explicitly banned from the area of firearms and ammo. This is not unique, there are many other things like "tobacco, motor vehicles, pesticides, aircraft, aircraft engines and boats" (http://www.nssf.org/newsroom/writers/guide/regulations.cfm) where the regulation is done by other units of the government, generally ones with domain knowledge. E.g. pesticides touch on at least three areas, safety to those handling and using them, plus food and environmental safety, that's more like the remit of OSHA (which can cover the much smaller consumer uses) plus the FDA and EPA.
> in a period when both the population and number of guns owned by it increased by very roughly 50%
An increase in the number of guns owned is deceptive. The percentage of Americans who own a gun and the percentage of households that contain a gun have been decreasing, I think from about half of households in the seventies to about a third today (NRA point to different research that shows less of a decline). The number of guns owned has increased because some people who already have a gun buy more, sometimes many more.
I've run the numbers on the claim you're repeating, and they would have us existing gun owners owning armories worth $100,000 on average if true (note the raw numbers, of new guns and their values, are easily available from Pittman Robertson Act tax collection reports, check out the ATF or NSSF if you want to duplicate my work on the $100K average estimate).
We in the gun community believe it is much more likely that the willingness of Americans to honestly answer a random voice on the phone asking us if we own guns or having one in our household varies depending on the Zeitgeist, and that's been bad for a long time until, again, turning around only recently.
This seems to be driven by 9/11 and the government's feckless domestic response to it, and the increasing ability of Americans to carry concealed, especially in combination with a rapidly aging population. WRT the latter, the vast majority of those in my Missouri concealed carry class were older types, middle aged at minimum.
With Wisconsin and Iowa moving to shall issue voluntarily, and Illinois forced by the courts, we're down to only 7 slave states, and in many populous California counties it's allowed (Massachusetts towns too, but it's a small state). And 2 more states have been added to no licence required Constitutional Carry in the last few days, WV and Idaho; we're pretty sure this is resulting in a lot of first time gun owners, and this has really taken off since the last time I believe those estimates were made.
The numbers are amazing to this gun owner who grew up when that was generally impossible; 8 million licenses nationwide 2 summers ago, 12+ in the last accounting a few months? ago, Texas just passed 1 million, Pennsylvania hit that long ago, etc. etc. etc.
That said, new immigrants don't tend to be gun owners, but it doesn't take long for us to lead them down the path of temptation ^_^.
To quote from memory another about our ever hardening position on decades of bad faith attacks on firearms ownership:
"How many children are we willing to let die?"
"Every single one of them."
Let me assure you we're very bit as callous as those who think that "a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound."
You're just not going to disarm us, heck, we're winning at the state level more and more, as mentioned in another comment Idaho and WV are going Constitutional Carry, and they're not the only states where that's in play this legislative year.
Why? Well, we think these bad outcomes are more than outweighed by the good ones, like the ~2.5 million uses of guns in self-defense per year. Even in terms of raw numbers of dead and injured our approach probably wins, and we think the value of having this defense for the lives of our families and ourselves is of inestimable value.
At the extreme, we look at longer time frames, including the 20th Century, where substantially more than 100 million previously disarmed people were murdered by their own governments, or conquerors like in the bloodlands between Germany and the USSR.
As for your specifics:
There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870
Ditto the "school shootings", that redefines the term to include gang sorts of crime.
As for how many killed and injured, we're an historically violent people, and an obsession on one particular instrument we use to express that violence is misplaced.
If someone shot at multiple people, then its a mass shooting.
Not as it's officially defined by the FBI. It requires, in a single incident, 4 people being murdered. You can of course change the numbers by redefining the words of art as the "study" did, but so what?
Did you even read the Mother Jones article? I can't recall exactly what it said, but I myself picked apart some of the "study's" cited incidents, like the infamous one where couple of reporters were killed, one was wounded, and the killer later took his own life. Which obviously doesn't fit the FBI definition. Others were reported to simply not exist, or at least no one could find any verification.
Is there any hoop you won't jump through to justify tens of thousands of deaths?
"We don't care."
Are you from the U.K.? (A guess based on your comment history, word choices, Commonwealth spelling, etc.)
Who cares about an FBI definition. If someone attempts to kill multiple people and fails, it is still a mass shooting. Perhaps the terminology needs a definite glossary and we can give different names to these things.
Either way you are jumping through hopps to defend a personal freedom that, over time, has a negative impact on more people.
UNless of course you think some population reduction by way to gun is a positive thing for a population
Very few know that swallowing two or more small magnets can result in death in a few days, even with medical treatment, especially if the treatment is "too late". That's very much unlike other "small bits of metal", to which I'd include small ammunition (although the commonly unplated lead bullets in .22 LR ammo would add a lead exposure threat).
And then there's the little matter of the 2nd Amendment, we have no Constitutionally enshrined right to keep and bear small magnets, which are also fantastically less useful than guns.
For that matter, in the 1970's heyday of US gun control, the CPSC was explicitly banned from the area of firearms and ammo. This is not unique, there are many other things like "tobacco, motor vehicles, pesticides, aircraft, aircraft engines and boats" (http://www.nssf.org/newsroom/writers/guide/regulations.cfm) where the regulation is done by other units of the government, generally ones with domain knowledge. E.g. pesticides touch on at least three areas, safety to those handling and using them, plus food and environmental safety, that's more like the remit of OSHA (which can cover the much smaller consumer uses) plus the FDA and EPA.