A post at Quartz digs in a little deeper to the numbers and finds that 40 of 50 states have had at least one such mass shooting this year, with New York (16), California (14), Florida (14), Texas (12), and Georgia (12) at the top of the list.
Advertisement
The Louisiana movie theatre shooting takes the total number of shootouts to 204.
The shooting at a Louisiana movie theater that left two dead victims and nine others injured was a shock to many local residents and politicians but does not qualify as a mass shooting according to federal standards.
On Thursday, July 23, a man walked into a movie theatre in Lafayette, Lousiana, and opened fire. The police say they have located the shooter’s vehicle across the street from the theatre parking lot and out of an “abundance of caution” called in the bomb squad.
(WSLS 10) – According to an article from the Washington Post, there have been 204 cases of four or more people being shot during one incident in 2015.
Forty U.S. states this year have seen mass shooting incidents “when four or more people are shot in an event, or related series of events, likely without a cooling off period”, according to the crowd-sourced website Mass Shooting Tracker.
Or, the June 17 fatal shooting of nine people by 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
These statistics were compiled by the Mass Shooting Tracker, a project by the users of the Guns Are Cool subreddit, and first picked up by the Washington Post.
Advertisement
It “did produce a fruitful national conversation – not on guns, but on the symbolism of the Confederate flag, which the shooter adopted as a banner of his racist beliefs”, the Post noted.
