The United States has just gone through the worst six months of mass killings in at least 17 years, according to a report at the Axios AM Newsletter. Writes Editor Mike Allen:
The U.S. has just endured the deadliest six months of mass killings since at least 2006, AP reports.
From Jan. 1 to June 30, the nation endured 28 mass killings (four or more killed, not counting the assailant).
27 of the 28 involved guns. The other was a fire that killed four in a home in Monroe, LA. A 37-year-old man was charged with arson and murder.
An expert on crime statistics calls the new data "staggering." Writes Allen:
A database maintained by AP and USA Today, in partnership with Northeastern University, tracks this violence back to 2006.
James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern who has been tracking crime data for 45+ years, said: "We used to say there were two to three dozen a year. The fact that there's 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic."
What is driving the increase in violence. Demographics and the sheer number of guns in circulation are cited as two key factors. From the Axios report:
Experts attribute the rising bloodshed to a growing population with an increased number of guns in the U.S.
Yet for all the headlines, mass killings are statistically rare — and represent a fraction of the country's overall gun violence.
An Axios report from May 9 noted that the U.S. was on a record pace for mass killings in 2023. From that report:
This year has seen more mass killings to date than any other year since 2006, according to a database from USA Today, Northeastern University, and Associated Press.
The killings in 2023 have been driven "exclusively by gun violence," as all 22 incidents of mass murder this year have involved guns, per AP. . . .
These killings can be perpetrated with knives or other weapons, but most are mass shootings.
The U.S. usually experiences about six mass killings in public places per year, with 10 being the highest it has ever seen in a single year, James Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University who oversees the database, told USA Today.
The mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen,Texas on May 6 marked the sixth public mass killing of 2023, just over a third of the way through the year.
The U.S. experiences a legion of mass shootings every year, with 2023 already seeing high-profile mass shootings in California, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
