Editor’s Note: On Oct. 30, 2023, The Post published a new project tracking mass shootings nationwide.
The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.
Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.
There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the public shootings in which four or more people were killed, usually by a lone shooter. It does not include shootings tied to robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.
Public mass shootings are a small slice of gun deaths
Source: Gun Violence Archive. Excludes the roughly 22,000 annual gun suicides, which are not publicly reported in real time.
This tally begins Aug. 1, 1966, when a student sniper fired down on passersby from the observation deck of a clock tower at the University of Texas. By the time police killed him, 17 other people were dead or dying. As Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff wrote, the shooting “ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere — even walking around a university campus on a summer day — could be killed at random by a stranger.”
Search for details of a particular shooting. The most recent is selected.
1,322 killed
The people who were killed came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background. Their ages range from the unborn to the elderly; were children and teenagers. In addition, thousands of survivors were left with devastating injuries, shattered families and psychological scars.
ClickTap on an icon for details about each victim.
The oldest victim
Louise De Kler, 98, still took her pool cue and boombox to the rec room at Pinelake Health and Rehab to play pool with the “young guys,” her daughter told the Associated Press. She was shot to death in 2009 by a man who had come to her Carthage, N.C., nursing home looking for his estranged wife.
The youngest victims
Eight-month-old Carlos Reyes was buried in a casket with his mother, Jackie, who had tried to shield him as an unemployed father of two opened fire at a busy McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Calif., in 1984. Glory Tucker, 5 months, was killed along with her three siblings by her mother, who had just fatally shot a neighbor in their building’s parking lot in 2020. Three unborn children are included in the official death tolls from shootings in Austin, Wilkinsburg, Pa., and Sutherland Springs, Texas.
360 guns
Shooters often carried more than one weapon; one was found with 24. At least of mass shooters’ weapons were obtained legally and were obtained illegally. It’s unclear how weapons were acquired.
Silhouettes represent a basic type of gun rather than exact makes or models. ClickTap on an icon for details about each gun.
Semiautomatic rifles
Semiautomatic rifles have been used in some of the country’s deadliest shootings, such as those in Newtown, Orlando, San Bernardino and Las Vegas. The AR-15, a lightweight, customizable version of the military’s M16, soared in popularity after a 10-year federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. Some of the Las Vegas shooter’s guns had been fitted with legal devices called “bump-fire stocks,” which allow semiautomatic rifles to fire as quickly as automatic ones.
Semiautomatic pistols
The country’s most popular type of firearm, 9mm semiautomatic handguns, are used by many law enforcement officers. They are generally light and inexpensive, easy to conceal and control, and they fire as quickly as a person can pull the trigger. The gunman who killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech in 2007 used a 9mm semiautomatic Glock 19 (and a .22-caliber Walther P22, another popular caliber). In this data, 9mm semiautomatic handguns show up more than any other weapon.
202 shooters
Some of these mass shooters were known to have violent tendencies or criminal pasts. Others seemed largely fine until they attacked. All but were male. The vast majority were between the ages of 20 and 49. More than half — of them — died at or near the scene of the shooting, often by killing themselves.
ClickTap on an icon for details about each shooter.
Women
Five women are on this list, and two of them partnered with men. Francine Graham and her boyfriend carried out the 2019 shooting in the Jersey City Kosher Supermarket. Pakistani mother Tashfeen Malik and her husband killed 14 partygoers at his workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015. Brittany Tucker killed a neighbor in a parking lot and then her four children in Monroe, La., in 2020. Cherie Lash Rhodes, a former tribal council chairwoman, killed her brother and three others at an eviction hearing in Alturas, Calif., in 2014, and ex-postal worker Jennifer San Marco killed seven in a Goleta, Calif., mail facility in 2006.
Middle-schoolers
Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, pulled a fire alarm to flush students and teachers out of their Jonesboro, Ark., middle school in 1998, and began shooting from a wooded perch nearby. They killed four girls and a teacher and wounded 10 others.
189 shootings
In the 50 years before the Texas tower shooting, there were just 25 public mass shootings in which four or more people were killed, according to author and criminologist Grant Duwe. Since then, the number has risen dramatically, and many of the deadliest shootings have occurred within the past few years.
HoverTap for details about each shooting.
Number dead (including shooters)
Number injured
42 states and the District
Shootings in schools and houses of worship tend to stand out in our minds, but they make up a relatively small portion of public mass shootings. More common are those in offices and retail establishments such as restaurants and stores. has had more of these public mass shootings than any other state, with .
HoverTap for info about each shooting.
Schools
Stores, restaurants and bars
Offices
Place of worship
Military bases
Other places
Some locations have simply become shorthand for the horrors that occurred there — Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook. And some have added other tragic phrases to the national vocabulary.
“Going postal”
One of the most notorious workplace shootings was carried out by an ex-Marine in an Edmond, Okla., post office in 1986. He killed 14 and wounded six before killing himself. It was the deadliest in a string of rage-fueled killings by current and former postal employees that gave rise to the phrase “going postal.”
“Active shooter”
The 1999 siege by two seniors at Columbine High School in Colorado became a turning point after which school shootings could no longer be considered unthinkable aberrations. After a confused response that played out over several hours while a wounded teacher bled to death, U.S. law enforcement agencies overhauled procedures and officer training to create protocols for stopping an “active shooter.”
“Lockdown drill”
After Columbine, many schools created safety plans so that children and educators would know what to do during an attack. After Sandy Hook, “lockdown drills” became as common as fire drills. No children were killed at the Rancho Tehama Elementary School shooting in California in 2017, when fast-acting educators and students executed lockdown procedures that kept the gunman out of the school.
Lazaro Gamio, Alex Horton, Denise Lu, Richard Johnson, Ted Mellnik and Kevin Uhrmacher contributed to this report.
About this story
This data is compiled from Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History,” Mother Jones and Washington Post research.
Death tolls include victims killed by shooters within a day of the main shooting, including any who were killed in another way. Totals also include people who later died from injuries received during the shootings. Injuries include everyone reportedly hurt in the event, not just gunshot injuries. A gun purchase that should have been rejected but was allowed because of a bureaucratic or reporting glitch is considered illegal. Reports disagree on some ages in this dataset.
Additional sources: Violence Policy Center, Gun Violence Archive; FBI 2014 Study of Active Shooter Incidents; published reports.
This is an updated version of a piece originally published in December 2015. Updates and corrections are made frequently as new information becomes available.
Originally published Feb. 14, 2018.
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