Washington DC, United States.- A mass shooting was reported near a youth center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a Subway restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. Another took place behind a brewery in Oklahoma City and yet another at a strip club outside of Columbus, Ohio. Two mass shootings ended parties in different Florida cities.
All those shootings were just on New Year’s Day.
By the start of the fourth week in January, the count had grown to include at least 39 separate shootings that have killed at least 69 people in all, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The deadliest shooting to date took place over the weekend in Monterey Park, California, a city with a thriving Asian-American community.
A gunman killed 11 people and wounded nine others inside a popular dance hall. Authorities said the shooter, who may have chosen his victims before committing suicide, was a 72-year-old man.
Then on Monday another deadly mass shooting took place in California. A gunman, who authorities say was 67, killed seven people and seriously injured at least one other person in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco.
“I was at the hospital meeting with the victims of a mass shooting when I was pulled aside to inform me of another shooting,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Monday. “Tragedy upon tragedy.”
The frequency of mass shootings and the variety of locations in which they now take place—offices and schools, nail salons, places of worship, grocery stores, and restaurants—contribute to the prevailing sense across America that such violence could burst anytime, anywhere.
It also fuels calls for gun control just as surely as it does the purchase of more and more guns. Public shootings are rampant in the nation, but they can have the effect of normalizing violence.
Criminologists say the prevalence of mass shootings is due in part to easy access to so many guns, a uniquely American feature, as well as the copycat effect.
“Would someone like that have committed a mass shooting in a ballroom in the past?” said Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, referring to the older man believed to have been the Monterey Park shooter.
“Maybe not. You can think of it as a snowball effect. The more incidents there are, the more prominent this option will be in the minds of angry people.”
And at the same time, the recurrence of such gun violence risks having the effect of numbing the nation to the tragedy, so much so that warnings not to get used to high-profile mass shootings are a familiar part of the response.
“We cannot become desensitized to these horrific acts of violence,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said after the Monterey Park shooting, which took place amid Lunar New Year celebrations over the weekend. “The Year of the Rabbit represents hope.”
The number of mass shootings has increased, 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 total for 2014. The number fell slightly last year, to 647, but remained significantly higher than previous years.
And the number of such shootings appears to be increasing in the first weeks of this year, compared to similar periods in recent years.
On average, there has been at least one mass shooting per day from January 1 to January 23 in each of the past five years, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.
But the last two years there is an upward trend, with 28 last year, 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. It’s enough.”
A 2015 study linked the country’s high rate of mass shootings to its high rate of gun ownership. Americans make up about 5 percent of the world’s population and own 42 percent of the world’s guns.
It is difficult to calculate the exact number of guns sold each year in the United States due to different state laws and purchasing scenarios. But FBI data on the number of firearms background checks can serve as a measure.
By that count, the totals have risen to 40 million background checks in 2021 from 10 million in 2005.
But later work suggests easy access to guns, not gun ownership, may be the factor, said Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who wrote the 2015 study.
Nearly 40 percent of American men tell investigators they own a gun, so gun ownership alone is not a useful predictor of who is likely to commit a mass shooting.
In a study of the 14 deadliest mass shootings since Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, he and a co-author showed that half of the perpetrators had not acquired their first firearm until the last year before the attack.
In many of the less reported mass shootings that take place in the United States, information about the shooter and the weapon used is not readily known.
After 12 people were shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend, three with what were described as life-threatening injuries, police implored people with information to come forward with information about the shooter.
In Rockford, Illinois, northwest of Chicago, three people were killed and two others injured in a shooting this month, and a suspect has yet to be publicly identified.
“You wish the same attention was paid to these everyday shootings,” Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said in an interview.
“I don’t want to sound insensitive about Monterrey Park, but at least those people will be remembered,” he added. “Last year I lost 15 lives in my community. There was no national story about it. It’s sad that we live in a country where violence is normalized.”
