According to the Gun Violence Archive and CNN definitions, an incident that kills at least four people without the gunman is considered a ‘mass shooting’. However, as defined by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a 2012 law, when three or more people are killed in an incident, it falls under the category of ‘indiscriminate shooting’.
According to statistics from the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 39 indiscriminate gun attacks so far this year. 2021 saw the highest number of indiscriminate shootings in the last 9 years. There were 690 indiscriminate shootings in the United States that year. The second highest number of 647 incidents occurred last year. And 610 indiscriminate shootings occurred in 2020.
A study published last year at the JAMA Network Open reviewed firearm deaths over the past three decades. It says that since 1990, more than 1 million people have lost their lives to firearms.
