LOS ANGELES (AP) — Four people have been found shot to death in an RV in a small Mojave desert community in California. Four partygoers killed and 32 injured in small Alabama town during Sweet 16 birthday party that ended with a girl kneeling beside her mortally wounded brother. Six people, including three 9-year-old children, was shot at an elementary school in nashville.
Now the discovery of seven people found shot to death in rural Oklahoma keeps the US on pace for mass killings in 2023 and could push the number of people killed above 100 for the year.
The Mojave killings over the weekend represented the 19th mass killing of the year, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in association with Northeastern University. That's the most in the first four months of the year since the data was first recorded in 2006. Oklahoma deaths had not been added to the database as of Tuesday afternoon.
Since the Mojave shooting, 97 people have been killed in 19 mass killings this year, surpassing the record set in 2009, when 93 people were killed in 17 incidents through the end of April.
The death toll is a fraction of the total number of people who died by homicide for the year. The database counts murders involving four or more victims, not including the perpetrator, the same standard as the FBI, and tracks a number of variables for each.
“No one should be shocked,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, he was one of 17 people killed at a Parkland, Florida High School in 2018. “I'm visiting my daughter at a cemetery. Outrage doesn't begin to describe how I feel.”
The Parkland victims are among 2,851 people who have died in mass killings in the US since 2006, according to the database.
Mass killings are happening with surprising frequency this year: an average of about one a week, according to an analysis of The AP/USA Today data.
The 2023 numbers stand out even more when compared to the tally for the full-year totals from the data collection. The US recorded 30 or fewer mass murders in more than half the years in the database, so being 19th a third of the way through is remarkable.
Violence has erupted from coast to coast and has been fueled by a range of motivations. Murder-suicides and domestic violence. gang retaliation; school shootings; and workplace feuds. All have claimed the lives of four or more people at once since January 1.
However, barriers to change remain. The possibility of bringing back Congress ban on semi-automatic rifles appears away, and the US Supreme Court last year set new standards to overhaul the nation's gun laws, calling into question nationwide gun restrictions.
The pace of mass shootings so far this year doesn't necessarily portend a new annual record. In 2009, the bloodshed slowed and the year ended with a final count of 32 mass killings and 172 deaths. Those numbers barely beat averages of 31.1 mass murders and 162 victims a year, according to an analysis of data dating back to 2006.
Tragic records have been set in the last decade. Figures show high 45 mass murders in 2019 and 230 people were killed in such tragedies in 2017. That year, 60 people died when a gunman opened fire above an outdoor country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. The carnage still accounts for most of the casualties from a mass shooting in modern America.
“This is the reality: If someone is determined to commit mass violence, they will,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Rockefeller State Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium. “And it's our role as a society to try to put up barriers and barriers to make it more difficult.”
But there is little indication at either the state or federal level — with a few exceptions — that many major policy changes are on the horizon.
Some states have tried to impose more gun control within their borders. Last month, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a new law imposing criminal background checks on the purchase of rifles and shotguns, whereas the state previously required them only for people buying handguns. And last week, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a ban on certain types of semi-automatic rifles in law. But it faces a federal court challenge.
Other states are experiencing a new round of pressure. In conservative Tennessee, protesters descended on the state Capitol to demand more gun regulation after the March school shooting in Nashville.
At the federal level, President Joe Biden last year signed a landmark gun violence bill into lawstrengthening background checks for younger gun buyers, keeping firearms from more domestic violence offenders, and helping states use red flag laws that allow police to ask courts to take guns from people who show signs they might to become violent.
https://apnews.com/video/politics-protests-and-demonstrations-national-dc5c5384fe174d4cacbce207ebb69d0e
Despite the garish headlines, mass murders are statistically rare, committed by only a handful of people each year in a country of nearly 335 million people. And there's no way to predict if this year's events will continue at this pace.
Sometimes mass killings happen back-to-back — like in January, when fatal events in California there was only a two-day gap — while other months go by without blood.
“We shouldn't necessarily expect this — one mass killing every less than seven days — to continue,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who oversees the database. “Let's hope it doesn't.”
However, experts and advocates condemn it arms proliferation in the US in recent years, incl record sales in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We need 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 guns everywhere, every place and every time.”
Jaime Guttenberg would be 19 years old now. Her father is now spending his days as a gun control activist.
“America 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.”
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Fenn reported from New York.
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This story has been corrected to say that shootings average about once a week, not nearly once a week.
