Grisly new record for mass killings in a single year
The United States suffered more mass killings this year than at any time since research into the phenomenon began in the 1970s, a grim database compiled by academics and journalists shows.
There were 41 such incidents, 33 of them mass shootings, with 210 people killed in 2019, despite a decline in the overall murder rate. A gunfight yesterday at a church in Fort Worth, Texas, in which at least two people were killed, threatened to push the total still higher.
Criminologists at Northeastern University, working in partnership with USA Today and the Associated Press, defined mass killings as incidents in which four or more people were killed, excluding the attacker.
James Densley, a criminologist at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, who was not involved in compiling the database, said that it bore out his own research. ‘‘This seems to be the age of mass shootings,’’ he said. ‘‘What makes this even more exceptional is that mass killings are going up at a time when general homicides, overall homicides, are going down.’’
The second worst year was 2006, when 38 mass killings were recorded, and 2017 was the year with the most fatalities from mass killings: 224 people, including 58 murdered in one incident at a Las Vegas music festival.
The first of this year’s mass killings happened on January 20, in Oregon, when a man brandishing an axe killed his mother, stepfather, girlfriend and his nine-month-old baby before he was shot dead by the police.
Many of the killings that followed did not make national headlines, possibly because they were not carried out in public places.
In a single weekend at the beginning of August a mass shooting at a Walmart in Texas followed by another on a busy street in Dayton, Ohio, led to fresh calls in Congress for stricter gun laws.
A total of 22 people were killed and 24 were injured in the Texas attack. It was carried out in El Paso by a young man who had posted a manifesto online about a ‘‘Hispanic invasion of Texas’’. He told detectives that he was targeting Mexicans. Barely 11 hours later another man opened fire in Dayton, killing nine people, including his sister.
Eight of this year’s mass killings were carried out in public places. Twelve people were killed at a municipal building in Virginia Beach by a former employee. In Texas, 28 days after the Walmart shooting, a man with a criminal record and a history of mental illness went on a shooting rampage in Odessa, west Texas, killing seven people.
An oil worker named Daniel Munoz told Associated Press that he had been at the scene of the Walmart shooting, on August 3, and was driving to a bar on August 31 when he saw a man in another car brandish a gun before spraying his vehicle with bullets. ‘‘You can’t just always assume you’re safe,’’ he said.
– The Times
‘‘What makes this even more exceptional is that mass killings are going up at a time when general homicides, overall homicides, are going down.’’
James Densley Metropolitan State University