35 Years of Mass Shootings in the US in One Chart
Update, Nov. 5, 2017 This post has been updated to include the mass shooting in Sutherland, Texas and several intermediate acts. An outdoor country music festival descended into chaos and bloodshed in Las Vegas Sunday night when a gunman opened fire from the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel, killing at least 58 people and wounding more than 500 according to early reports. The mass shooting is the deadliest in modern U.S. history. It is also far from the first mass shooting in the U.S. A database compiled by Mother Jones going back to 1982 counts 91 such incidents in which at least three people were killed, not including the gunman. In that time, 722 people have been killed and 1,177 wounded, based on the current counts from Las Vegas. The following chart visualizes each mass shooting in terms of deaths and injuries. As Mother Jones Mark Follman notes, the actual number of fatalities is probably higher. A 2013 federal mandate authorized by President Obama lowered the definition of a mass shooting down from four victims to three, which led to more of these shootings being tracked, but there may be earlier ones that are not included. The chart also does not include the thousands of killings each year in which there were fewer than three fatalities.