The lack of consensus on what qualifies as a mass shooting makes the problem confusing to talk about, let alone try to address, said Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. There is no national, legal definition of a “mass shooting.” Several organizations track mass shootings, but use different yardsticks: Some count only incidents in which three or more people are killed others measure incidents with at least four people killed or injured. The count puts 2022 on pace with last year, when there were a total of six mass shootings. Under this definition, there have been four mass shootings so far in 2022: Highland Park, Uvalde, Buffalo and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a gunman stormed a doctor’s office at a hospital complex, killing four people before taking his own life. It excludes murders that occur because of domestic violence, or in the course of another crime, such as armed robbery or gang violence. The Violence Project defines mass shootings as single incidents in which four or more people are killed (not including the shooter), in public locations, such as schools, stores, or workplaces.
The last five years have seen more mass shootings than any other comparable time span dating back to 1966. We compared five-year periods so we could measure trends over time, rather than focus on the dip to two incidents in 2020, which researchers attributed to the COVID-19 lockdown, or the spike caused by the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead. Thirty-one of these massacres occurred from 2017 through 2021, compared with 24 from 2012 through 2016, according to The Violence Project data. Our analysis is based on data from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers. Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the U.S., where about 124 people die every day in other acts of gun violence.
Under one of the most conservative definitions of “mass shootings,” in which a gunman slaughters four or more strangers in a public place, the number of these crimes has indeed been climbing in the last few years - and they have higher death tolls, as well.
Source: The Violence Project Mass Shooter Database, analyzed by The Marshall Project.
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