U.S. sets two grim records

Weekend mass shootings push year’s total, death toll to levels not seen since 2006

In less than 90 minutes Sunday afternoon, two 911 calls led police in Texas and Washington to two mass shootings that pushed the nation to a gruesome milestone.

They were the 37th and 38th shootings this year in which four or more victims were killed, the highest number of mass killings in any year since at least 2006. Last year’s 36 was the previous record.

In Dallas, a 21-year-old man who was supposed to be wearing an ankle monitor because of a previous aggravated assault charge walked into a house and shot five people, killing a toddler and three adults. He fled in a stolen car, police said, but fatally shot himself as highway patrol officers chased him.

In a suburb of Vancouver, Wash., five family members died in what sheriff ’s deputies think was a murder-suicide.

The latest deaths brought the 2023 total to 197, not counting the shooters — yet another record. Ninety-one people were wounded in those events but survived.

Like most mass killings, the most recent pair occurred not in headline-grabbing public locations but in private homes. The database The

Washington Post uses is compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University and dates to 2006.

Other organizations define a mass shooting more broadly than The Post and so report larger numbers.

Mass killings with guns rose in 2019 but dropped during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. As daily life gradually returned to normal, the frequency of the deadliest shootings crept up.

The record is “a tragic, shameful milestone that should — but probably will not — serve as a wake-up call” to lawmakers opposing gun regulations, said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction and an associate research professor at the University of Maryland. “The rise in mass shootings is driven by many factors, but increasingly easy access to firearms is the primary cause.”

Mass killings are not an epidemic, but a tip of the gun-violence iceberg, said James Alan Fox, the professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern who manages the mass killings database and has studied such violence for more than 40 years.

They account for a tiny percentage of gun deaths.

More than 48,000 people died of gunshot wounds in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which averages out to about 132 deaths per day.

More than half of those were suicides. “Far too many people are being are being killed by their own hand or by someone else’s hand,” Fox said. “And mass shootings just happen to be the most visible.”

This year, as well as every year since at least 2006, the largest number of mass killings occurred in private homes or shelters — at least 26 of the 37.

Just three shootings as of Monday were known or thought to be related to robberies, gang conflicts or drug-related crimes.

Instead, most perpetrators lashed out at strangers or people they knew, and they did so despite knowing the result would probably be their own death or life imprisonment, said Adam Lankford, chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama.

They had “no hope for the future,” he said.