In the 30 years through March, 78 public mass shootings occurred in the U.S. -- incidents in which four or more people were killed at random by a gunman killing indiscriminately, according to a report issued that month by the Congressional Research Service. These crimes don’t include gang-related killings or domestic disputes where a person slays relatives or other people linked to the assailant.
The mass slaughters listed in the report caused the deaths of 547 people. Over the same three decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of 1 percent of the 559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered in America.
“It is a very, very small percentage,” said James Alan Fox, who teaches criminology at Boston’s Northeastern University and co-authored a book about mass shootings called “Extreme Killing,” published in 2011...
In his research, Fox uses a broader definition of mass killing than the research service report -- he looks at any homicide resulting in four or more deaths, regardless of motive, which includes killings in domestic disputes and robberies gone bad. He reports no increase in mass killings in recent years.
“This is not an epidemic,” he said.
In a database of mass killings since 2006 compiled by USA Today, roughly half of all instances where more than four died were motivated by a family dispute of some kind, while 30 percent start as robberies or burglaries. Just 20 percent were the type of public, random killings that occurred in Washington, the newspaper said...
