Mass shootings scar 2023
Across US, dozens of such tragedies fill first few weeks
There was the mass shooting near a youth center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the one at a Subway restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. Another took place behind a beer hall in Oklahoma City, and another at a strip club outside Columbus, Ohio. Two mass shootings ended parties in different Florida cities.
And that was just on New Year’s Day. By the start of the fourth week in January, the tally had grown to include at least 39 separate shootings in which four or more people were injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive, outlining a striking explosion of violence across a range of sites in nearly every corner of the nation that killed at least 69 people.
The deadliest shooting took place Saturday in Monterey Park, California, a city with a thriving Asian American community where a gunman killed 11 people and wounded nine others inside a dance hall. Authorities said the gunman, who may have targeted his victims and who later killed himself, was a 72-year-old man.
Then, on Monday, came another deadly mass shooting in California. A gunman, whom authorities said was a 67-year-old man, killed seven people and seriously wounded at least one other person in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco.
“At the hospital meeting with victims of a mass shooting when I get pulled away to be briefed about another shooting,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California tweeted Monday. “Tragedy upon tragedy.”
The frequency of mass shootings and the variety of their locations — at offices and schools, nail salons and houses of worship, grocery stores and restaurants — contributes to the sense, prevalent across America, that such violence could break out at any moment, anywhere. It fuels calls for gun control just as certainly as it does the purchase of more and more guns. Public shooting sprees rivet the nation, but can also have the effect of normalizing violence.
Criminologists say the prevalence of mass shootings is brought about in part by the easy access to so many weapons — a unique feature of the United States — as well as by a copycat effect.
“Would someone like this have committed a mass shooting at a dance hall in the past?” Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, said, referring to the older man believed to have been the gunman in Monterey Park. “Maybe not. You can kind of think of it as a snowball effect. The more incidents there are, the more prominent this option will be in angry people’s minds.”
And at the same time, the recurrence of such gun violence risks having the effect of desensitizing the nation to tragedy, so much so that warnings not to become accustomed to high-profile mass shootings are a familiar part of the response.
“We cannot become numb to these horrific acts of violence,” the district attorney of San Francisco, Brooke Jenkins, said after the Monterey Park shooting, which took place amid Lunar New Year celebrations over the weekend. “The Year of the
Rabbit stands for hope.”
The number of mass shootings has been rising, though not steadily, since 2014, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks public reports of shootings. There were 690 shootings with four or more victims in 2021, more than double the 2014 total. The number fell slightly last year, to 647, but remained significantly higher than in previous years.
And the number of such shootings appears to be rising in the first few weeks of this year, as compared with similar periods in recent years. There has been, on average, fewer than one mass shooting per day from Jan. 1 to Jan. 23 in each of the past five years, according to the Gun Violence Archive data, but the past two years have been trending up, to 28 last year from 26 in 2021, and 16 in 2018.
“There is no place left in America that is safe from gun violence,” David Min, a California state senator, said in response to the Monterey Park shooting. “This has to stop. Enough is enough.”
Even as crime rates decline, gun violence is on the rise, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the regional gun violence research consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.
But Schildkraut said it was important to distinguish between “public mass shootings” like those in Monterey Park, which are known to be premeditated, and other categories, like killings among family members or shootings that erupt out of an argument.
Public mass shootings are the least common and the most deadly, she said. And the type of policy interventions that are most likely to avert them are different.
“All gun violence and the loss of any one individual is one too many,” Schildkraut said. “They are different buckets that require us to think about their unique characteristics and add in layers of prevention and response accordingly.”
A 2015 study linked the nation’s high rate of mass shootings to its high rate of gun ownership. Americans make up about 5% of the global population and own 42% of the world’s guns, the study said.
But subsequent work suggests that the governing factor may be easy access to guns, not ownership of them, said Lankford, who wrote the 2015 study.
Nearly 40% of American men tell researchers that they own a gun, so gun ownership alone is not a useful predictor of who is likely to commit a mass shooting, Lankford said. In a study of the 14 deadliest mass shootings since the high school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, he and a co-author showed that half of the perpetrators had not acquired their first firearm until the final year before their attack.