2015 'Mass Shootings' In The United States: More Than One A Day

Wednesday’s shooting in San Bernardino, California, is just the latest in a string of high-profile shootings in the United States in 2015. Many of those were considered by recent standards as mass shootings.

• See Patch’s latest coverage of Wednesday’s California shooting here.

Before Wednesday’s shooting, which left at least 14 dead, the most recent incident occurred over the weekend in Colorado Springs at a Planned Parenthood clinic, where three people, including a police officer, died. Nine others were injured.

That’s hardly been the only violence in 2015:

• Nine people died in June at a shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church.
• In July, three people died and at least nine were wounded at a shooting in a Lafayette, Louisiana, at a movie theater.
• A man killed two news anchors on live TV, then killed himself after injuring another person, in Roanoke, Virginia in August.

When a gunman at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killed nine in October, President Barack Obama declared somberly, “This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America.”

Sadly, Obama’s estimate of “every few months” is wrong.

While the shocking, high-profile cases at churches, movie theaters and schools get the attention every month or so, mass shootings — by anyone’s definition — are much more common.

The Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced effort to, well, track mass shootings, defines such an incident as any shooting in which four or more people are killed or wounded, a definition that has been adopted by the Washington Post, ABC and other major media outlets.

The San Bernardino mass shooting is the 355th in the United States so far in 2015, according to Mass Shooting Tracker.

That’s an average of more than one mass shooting per day this year in America.

And it’s a much different story than the FBI’s definition of mass shooting — three or more killed. Using the FBI’s definition, there have been 66 mass shootings this year.

“In 2012 Travis Steed and others shot 18 people total. Miraculously, he only killed one,” the website says.

“Under the incorrect definition of mass shooting, that event would not be considered a mass shooting! Arguing that 18 people shot during one event is not a mass shooting is absurd.”

Perhaps the most memorable mass shooting in recent memory was Adam Lanza walking into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killing 20 children and six adults in December 2012.

The tracker reported 336 mass shootings in 2014 and 363 in 2013, when the tracking began.