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 by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.
Mass shootings are a small slice of total gun deaths
Source: Gun Violence Archive, Post research
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.
1,077 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. Two unborn children are included in the official death tolls from shootings in Austin and Sutherland Springs, Texas.
292 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
153 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
The most recent female shooter was a Pakistani mother who helped kill 14 partygoers at her husband’s workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015. The others are an ex-postal worker who killed a former neighbor and six employees at a Goleta, Calif., mail-processing facility in 2006; and a former tribal council chairwoman who killed her brother and three others during an eviction hearing in Alturas, Calif., in 2014.
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.
150 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
Number injured
41 states and the District
Shootings in schools and houses of worship tend to stick in our minds, but they make up a relatively small portion of mass shootings. More common are those in offices and retail establishments such as restaurants and stores. has had more 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 — Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino — others have added 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 “active shooters.”
Additional contributions by Alex Horton, Lazaro Gamio, Kevin Uhrmacher, Richard Johnson and Ted Mellnik.
About this story
This data is compiled from Mother Jones; Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History,” and Washington Post research. It does not include shootings in which a shooter killed only family members in a private home.
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. 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.
Originally published Feb. 14, 2018.
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