US passes 600 mass shootings for third straight year
The U.S. has seen more than 600 mass shootings for three straight years.
According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, there have been 609 incidents in 2022 in which four or more people, other than the attacker, were shot — putting the U.S. on pace to reach around 675 by the end of the year.
Last year saw a staggering 690 mass shootings across the nation, up from 610 in 2020 and 417 in 2019.
“The country is three mass shootings away from 2022 being the second-highest yearly total since we began tracking data,” the GVA database researchers said Wednesday. By Thursday, the country was just two shootings away from that dark milestone.
Five people were killed in a mass shooting at Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., earlier this week, and six were killed Wednesday at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va.
The recent deaths add to the grim total number of gun violence deaths in the U.S. this year, which the Gun Violence Archive database puts at 39,816.
More than 18,000 of those deaths were homicides, while around 21,500 were suicides.
“GVA had never logged a month of 60+ mass shootings before 2020. It happened five times in 2020, six times in 2021, and now six times again this year,” the GVA researchers said after the Colorado incident.
The U.S. has experienced an average of 1.68 mass shootings per day so far this year, according to GVA. The average has been above 1 each year since 2019, with 1.9 mass shootings per day in 2021.
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