PUSH NEWS NEWS 24 INTERNATIONAL: November 23rd, 2022
There have been more than 600 mass shootings so far this year in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Mass shootings, as is well known by now, are a common recurrence in the United States. We ended 2021 with 690 mass shootings, per the Gun Violence Archive. The year before saw 611. And 2019 had 417.
The massacres don’t come out of nowhere, says Mark Follman, who has been researching mass shootings since 2012, when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
“This is planned violence. There is, in every one of these cases, always a trail of … behavioral warning signs,” he told NPR in May.
Follman, the author of a new book, Trigger Points, says the role of mental health is also widely misunderstood.
“The general public views mass shooters as people who are totally crazy, insane. It fits with the idea of snapping, as if these people are totally detached from reality.”
That’s not the case, he said. There’s “a very rational thought process” that goes into planning and carrying out mass shootings.
The suspect in the Uvalde attack was a high school student who bought at least two AR-15-style rifles shortly after his 18th birthday and shot his grandmother before going to the elementary school, officials said.
A shooter opened fire late Tuesday at a Walmart in the Tidewater area of Virginia, killing five people. The attack comes days after five people were killed and 18 more injured in a shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, and about a week after a shooting at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville left three dead.
Mass shootings — where four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed — have averaged more than one per day so far this year. Not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least four mass shootings.
Mass shootings have been on the rise in recent years. In 2021, almost 700 such incidents occurred, a jump from the 610 in 2020 and 417 in 2019. Before that, incidents had not topped 400 annually since the Gun Violence Archive started tracking in 2014.
2022 is close behind the high reached last year when comparing the same time period.
The toll is immense. Mass shootings have killed 635 people and injured 2,540 more through November 22nd.