By repeating the atrocity on a weekly basis so far this year, the US is on track to break a record for mass killings in 2023. Over the course of 111 days, the bloodshed claimed 88 lives in 17 mass murders. The murderers always used weapons.
Only 2009 experienced as many of these disasters in the same time frame. Children at a Nashville elementary school were shot and killed on an ordinary Monday. Northern California farmworkers were shot over a workplace vendetta. Dancers were murdered while celebrating the Lunar New Year at a ballroom outside of Los Angeles. In the past week alone, shots poured down on a Sweet 16 celebration in Dadeville, Alabama, killing four partygoers and injuring 32 others. And in Bowdoin, Maine, a recently released prisoner shot and killed four people, including his parents, before turning the gun on drivers on a busy freeway.
2,842 people have died in mass killings in the US since 2006
“Nobody should be shocked,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was one of 17 people killed at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018. “I visit my daughter in a cemetery. Outrage doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.”
According to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University, the Parkland victims are among the 2,842 people who have died in mass shootings in the US since 2006. It uses the same criteria as the FBI for counting killings that result in four or more fatalities, excluding the killer, and it keeps track of several factors for each.
Only a small portion of the lethal violence that kills people each year in the US is represented by the bloodbath. However, a review of data from The AP/USA Today shows that mass killings are occurring at a startlingly high rate this year—once every 6.53 days on average. When compared to the sum for full-year totals since data collection began, the 2023 figures stand out even more. The US recorded 30 or fewer mass killings in more than half of the years in the database, so to be at 17 less than a third of the way through is remarkable.
US Supreme Court last year established new guidelines for evaluating the country’s gun laws
Numerous factors from coast to coast are responsible for the violence. Domestic abuse, gang retribution, murder-suicides, school shootings, and workplace vendettas are all examples of violence. Since January 1, all have simultaneously claimed the lives of four or more persons at once. However, there is still violence and resistance to reform. Congress is unlikely to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic weapons, and the US Supreme Court last year established new guidelines for evaluating the country’s gun laws, raising doubts about firearms limits elsewhere around the nation.
There is no guarantee that this year will set a new annual record for the number of mass shootings. The bloodbath decreased in 2009, and the year ended with a total tally of 32 mass murders and 172 fatalities. A study of statistics from 2006 showed that the numbers slightly exceeded the averages of 31.1 mass killings and 162 victims per year.
Recently, gruesome records have been broken. According to the data, there were 230 mass fatalities in 2017 and a peak of 45 in 2019. When a shooter opened fire over an outdoor country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip that year, 60 people died. The tragedy continues to have the highest number of fatalities from a mass shooting in contemporary America. According to Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, “Here’s the reality: If someone is determined to commit mass violence, they’re going to.“And it’s our role as a society to try and put up obstacles and barriers to make that more difficult.”
“We have to know that this isn’t the way to live”
Despite the alarming headlines, there are only a small number of mass murders every year in this nation of roughly 335 million people. Furthermore, it is impossible to forecast whether the current pace of the events will continue. While other months go by without any carnage, sometimes mass killings occur back-to-back, as was the case in January when tragic incidents in California happened just two days apart. “We shouldn’t necessarily expect that this — one mass killing every less than seven days — will continue,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who is in charge of the database. “Hopefully not,” she said.
The growth of weapons in the US in recent years, notably record sales during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, has nonetheless drawn criticism from experts and advocates. According to John Feinblatt, the head of Everytown for Gun Safety, “We have to know that this isn’t the way to live.” “We don’t have to live this way. And we cannot live in a country with an agenda of guns everywhere, every place, and every time.”