LOS ANGELES — The United States is setting a record pace for mass murder in 2023playing the horror on a loop about once a week so far this year.
The carnage has claimed 88 lives in 17 mass murders over 111 days. Each time, the killers wielded firearms.
Children at a Nashville elementary school, gunned down on any given Monday. Farmworkers in Northern California sprayed with bullets for rancor in the workplace. Dancers in a ballroom on the outskirts of Los Angeles, massacred while celebrating Lunar New Year.
In the past week alone, four partygoers have been killed and 32 wounded in Dadeville, Alabama, when bullets rained down on a Sweet 16 celebration. And a man fresh out of prison fatally shot four people, including his parents, in Bowdoin, Maine, before opening fire on motorists traveling on a busy interstate highway.
“Nobody should be surprised,” 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 at a cemetery. Outrage doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.»
The Parkland victims are among the 2,842 people who have died in mass shootings in the United States since 2006, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today, in collaboration with Northeastern University. It counts murders involving four or more deaths, not including the perpetrator, the same standard as the FBI, and tracks a number of variables for each.
Bloodshed represents only a fraction of the fatal violence that occurs in the US annually. Yet mass murders are occurring with astonishing frequency this year: an average of once every 6.53 days, according to an analysis of The AP/USA Today data. Only 2009 was marked by so many tragedies like this in the same period of time.
From coast to coast, violence is triggered by a variety of reasons. Murder-suicides and domestic violence; gang retaliation; school shootings and workplace vendettas. All have claimed the lives of four or more people at once since January 1.
However, the violence continues and the barriers to change remain. The likelihood that Congress will reinstate Ban on semi-automatic rifles. appears far away, and the Last year, the US Supreme Court set new standards for revising the nation’s gun laws, challenging nationwide firearms restrictions.
The pace of mass shootings so far this year does not necessarily herald a new annual record. In 2009, the bloodshed slowed, and the year ended with a final tally of 32 mass murders and 172 deaths. Those numbers barely beat the averages of 31.1 mass murders and 162 victims a year, according to an analysis of data dating back to 2006.
Ghastly records have been set in the last decade. The data shows a maximum of 45 mass murders in 2019 and 230 people killed in such tragedies in 2017. That year, 60 people died when a Gunman Opens Fire at Outdoor Country Music Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. The massacre is still responsible for the most deaths from a mass shooting in modern America.
“Here’s the reality: If someone is determined to commit mass violence, they will,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Rockefeller Institute for Government’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium. «And it’s our role as a society to try to put up obstacles and barriers to make that more difficult.»
But there is little indication at the state or federal level, with a handful of exceptions, that many major policy changes are on the way.
Some states have tried to impose more gun control within their own borders. Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a new law mandate criminal background checks to purchase rifles and shotguns, whereas the state previously required them only for people buying handguns. And on Wednesday a ban on dozens of types of semi-automatic rifles cleared the Washington State Legislature and is heading to the Governor’s Desk.
Other states are experiencing a new round of pressure. In conservative Tennessee, protesters descended on the state capitol to demand more gun regulation after six people were killed in Nashville private elementary school last month.
At the federal level, President Joe Biden last year signed a landmark bill on gun violencetightening background checks for younger gun buyers, keeping firearms out of the reach of more domestic violence offenders, and helping states use red flag laws that allow police to ask courts to remove guns weapons from people who show signs that they might turn violent.
Despite the blaring headlines, mass murders are statistically rare, perpetrated by just a handful of people each year in a country of nearly 335 million. And there is no way to predict if this year’s events will continue at this rate.
Sometimes mass murders happen back to back, like in January when deadly events in northern and southern California it happened just two days apart, while other months go by without bloodshed.
«We shouldn’t necessarily expect this, mass murder every less than seven days, to continue,» said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. «Let’s hope it doesn’t.»
Still, experts and advocates condemn the Gun proliferation in the US in recent years, including record sales during the height of the pandemic.
“We have to know that this is not the way to live,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “We don’t have to live this way. And we cannot live in a country with an agenda of arms everywhere, in all places and at all times.»
The National Rifle Association did not respond to AP’s request for comment.
Jaime Guttenberg would be 19 years now. His father now spends his days as a gun control activist.
«The United States should not be surprised by where we are today,» Guttenberg said. “It’s all in the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. But we have to do something immediately to fix it.»