If you want a content warning, this post is about mass shootings. No terrible photos, just the names of and some details about many past incidents.
This morning I started thinking about when I first began considering that mass shootings were something I should think about myself when I was out in public.
I think it was after the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. So that made me want to check to remember when that was exactly, and when was it relative to the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which six other people were killed, because that was another one that made me think about it, since that was also in a very public place.
It turns out those two mass shootings were a bit more than a year apart: the Giffords shooting in January 2011, Aurora in July 2012.
The Wikipedia has a handy list of mass shootings in the United States. Of course they do.
Out of all of the mass shootings that have happened in this country, I've made a list of the ones that stuck in my mind. It's an idiosyncratic list: sometimes it has to do with where I was when I heard about a shooting, or the sheer scale of the deaths and the amount of coverage, or the motivation of the killer, after that was known.
I've made up my own key for the "reason" behind each:
- R1 - Racist
- R2 - Religious bias
- R3 - Random/unknown/so-called mental illness/politically motivated
- Q - Anti-queer
- S - School-based (not a reason, of course, though it's sometimes mental illness/bullying, but the age and setting is a commonality)
You'll notice I have not included any workplace shootings. I am not discounting them, but I admit they seem less random to me than the others, so they aren't the ones that have stuck with me.
| Place, details | Year, month | Code |
|---|---|---|
| West Paducah, Kentucky – high school |
1997 Dec. | S |
| Columbine – Colorado | 1999 April | S |
| Virginia Tech | 2007 April | S |
| Binghamton, New York – immigration center | 2009 April | R3 |
| Fort Hood, Texas | 2009 Nov. | R3 |
| Tucson, Arizona – Gabby Giffords event | 2011 Jan. | R3 |
| Aurora, Colorado – movie theater | 2012 July | R3 |
| Oak Creek, Wisconsin – Sikh Temple | 2012 Aug. | R2 R1 |
| Newtown Connecticut – Sandy Hook Elementary | 2012 Dec. | S |
| Isla Vista, California woman-hater | 2014 May | R3 |
| Charleston, S. Carolina – Mother Emanuel church | 2015 June | R1 |
| San Bernardino, California married couple | 2015 Dec. | R3 |
| Orlando, Florida – Pulse Nightclub | 2016 June | Q |
| Sutherland Springs, Texas – church | 2017 Nov. | R3 |
| Las Vegas, Nevada – concert sniper | 2017 Oct. | R3 |
| Parkland, Florida – high school | 2018 Feb. | S |
| Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Tree of Life Synagogue | 2018 Oct. | R2 |
| El Paso, Texas – Walmart | 2019 Aug. | R1 |
| Dayton, Ohio – downtown | 2019 Aug. | R3 |
| Atlanta, Georgia – spa/salons | 2021 March | R1 |
| Buffalo, New York – Tops Market | 2022 May | R1 |
| Uvalde, Texas – elementary school | 2022 May | S |
| Highland Park, Illinois – parade | 2022 July | R1 |
| Colorado Springs, Colorado – Club Q | 2022 Oct. | Q |
That first one on my list isn't a shooting that most people remember, but I do, for some reason. Yet there are so many fairly recent mass shootings on the Wikipedia list that I don't remember anything about or only vaguely remember: the 2021 FedEx shooting in Indianapolis? that supermarket in Boulder?
That's a commentary on how many there have been. Even some of the ones I've listed have started to fade in my memory: Dayton (which happened the day after El Paso!), the Highland Park July 4 parade, the Sutherland Springs church. Maybe in a few years I won't really remember much about those, either.
Reading through the full Wikipedia list, it's clear there have been many more in the past decade, and in the previous decade than in each one before that. In the entire 1980s, for instance, there was only one large mass shooting outside of a workplace (22 dead, 19 injured) that would fit among the ones that come up all too frequently today: the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre (remember that? I do... just barely).
The 1990s saw just a few more than one, particularly the Luby's Restaurant shooting in Killeen, Texas (24 dead, 27 injured... which I had forgotten about), and the ’90s came to a close with Columbine, of course. The assault weapons ban expired in September 2004. State gun laws were getting laxer and laxer beginning around that time as well. If you count the number of rows in the Wikipedia table by year, you can see the number of mass shootings per year goes up starting after 2004.
No matter how much I think I will remember, it's not possible. No matter how much it seems like I will not become numb to it, it happens.
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