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For most people, the word mass shooting invokes images of horrifying events such as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people (including 20 children) were killed in December 2012, the massacre in Las Vegas in 2017 where more than 50 people were killed at a music festival, or the killing of more than 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019. So when outlets such as USA Today, CBS News, and Yahoo News published articles with headlines such as El Paso, Dayton make 251 mass shootings in the US in 216 days, more shootings than days in the year, or There have been more mass shootings than days this year, some readers were a bit shocked by the numbers. At the moment, no set definition exists for what is meant by mass shooting. That means the number of mass shootings that occur each year varies greatly depending on the criteria used to count them. For instance, one organization may count a mass shooting if it involves four or more people who are injured by a gun, while other organizations may only count a mass shooting if it involves four or more people killed by a gun. These numbers can also be skewed by other factors. For example, some organizations don't include crimes involving gangs or domestic violence in their mass-shooting reports, while others do. The FBI itself has no set definition for mass shooting. In 2005, the government organization described mass murder as a single incident that results in four or more deaths. This standard was also used for a 2015 Congressional Research Service report about mass shootings: The claim that the United States had 251 mass shootings in the first 216 days of 2019 originates from data collected by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a non-profit organization that tracks gun-related violence in the U.S. The GVA counts any incident in which four or more people were shot and/or killed. Also, the GVA list includes ALL incidents of gun violence, meaning that they don't exclude incidents involving gangs or domestic violence: The Gun Violence Archive's ongoing tally of mass shootings can be viewed here. As the GVA only requires four or more people to be shot, and not necessarily killed, many of the shootings on this list don't involve fatalities. As such, many of these incidents probably didn't make headline news, which explains why so many people were shocked to see the number 251, using GVA's criteria, for the first 216 days of 2019. Beyond GVA, others have tallied mass shootings differently. News outlet Mother Jones, for instance, has been studying mass shootings since a dozen people were killed in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. Mother Jones uses a stricter set of rules to define mass shootings. For that organization, a mass shooting is defined as an incident involving four or more people killed by guns. Mother Jones also excludes incidents that may stem from crimes, such as armed robbery or gang violence. Under Mother Jones' criteria, the number of mass shootings in the U.S for the first 216 days of 2019 is seven. ABC News used similar criteria for an August 2019 report on mass shootings in the U.S. The news outlet did not exclude shootings related to more conventional crimes, as Mother Jones did, and found that the U.S. had 17 deadly mass shootings in the same time period: In sum, the question boils down to how mass shooting is defined. When defined as any incident in which four or more people are shot, the number of mass shootings for the first 216 days of 2019 is above 250. When mass shooting is defined as an incident in which more four or more people are killed (and excludes domestic and other more conventional crime-related violence) the number of mass shootings during that time period in 2019 is seven. If we include conventional crime-related incidents, such as domestic violence, the number of mass shootings is around 17.
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