How Many Lone Shooter Incidents Happen in the U.S.?

Seven people died in a mass shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., Tuesday night, including the gunman, who shot himself. He was an manager at the store, according to USA Today, and opened fire in a break room. Five more people were injured. This brings the count of this year's lone shooter mass shootings in the U.S. to 12.

The shooting comes just days after five died and 18 were injured in an attack on an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., Saturday. The targeted attack on the LGBTQ community has reverberated throughout the state of Colorado and the United States six years after the devastating shooting at the Pulse gay club in Orlando, Fla.

A total of 74 people died in lone shooter mass shootings in 2022, the most since 2018. The high 2017 tally includes 58 killed at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, while 2016 deaths include the 49 lives lost at Pulse.

After a pandemic respite, grueling mass shootings have returned as a sad mainstay of U.S. news. At 12 mass shootings, 2022 has seen one of the highest counts in the last ten years. Overall, Mother Jones has counted 75 mass shootings that caused the deaths of three or more people in the U.S. since 2013. The combined death toll of these events tops 500.

Mother Jones applies a narrow definition of mass shootings. Counting those which left at least three dead by gunshot (not counting the perpetrator), they also only count incidents where lone shooters attacked in a public setting or several public settings in short succession. This excludes shootings with high death counts in private settings, often related to domestic violence or organized crime. It also excludes those where several shooters are attacking.

Those two events combined are actually more common than public setting lone shooter incidents. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were more than 60 shootings where three or more victims died regardless of circumstance in 2022 alone (to-date). These shootings have left around 280 dead just this year, according to the website's tally compared to 74 counted under Mother Jones' definition. While public lone shooter events dropped significantly in 2020, this cannot be said for all mass shootings. In 2020, Gun Violence Archive still counted 47 incidents, before recording a peak of 77 in 2021.

Independent of how mass shootings are defined, their victims make up only a fraction of all annual firearm fatalities in the United States. Compared to the 50-300 people who die in mass shootings, around 20,000 people were shot and killed in all homicides in 2020 - in addition to more than 24,000 suicides carried out with firearms annually.