There was a mass shooting near a youth center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a Subway restaurant in Durham, North Carolina.
Another took place behind a brewery in Oklahoma City and another at a strip club outside of Columbus, Ohio.
Two
mass shootings
ended parties in different Florida cities.
And
that was just New Year's Day.
By the start of the fourth week of January, the count had grown to include
at least 39 separate shootings
in which four or more people were injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence File, which describes a
startling explosion of violence
in a variety of
of sites.
in almost every corner of the nation that killed at least 69 people.
The deadliest shooting to date took place over the weekend in Monterey Park, California, a city with a thriving Asian-American community, where a gunman killed 11 people and wounded nine others inside a popular dance hall. .
Authorities said the shooter, who may have attacked his victims and then killed himself,
was a 72-year-old man.
Police officers at the scene of a mass shooting in Miami Gardens earlier this month.
Photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York Times
Then on Monday another deadly mass shooting took place in California.
A gunman, who authorities say was a 67-year-old man, killed seven people and seriously injured at least one other person in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco.
“At the hospital meeting with the victims of a mass shooting when I was pulled aside to inform me of another shooting,” Governor Gavin Newsom of California tweeted Monday.
"Tragedy upon tragedy."
From offices to restaurants
The frequency of mass shootings and the variety of locations in which they now take place
—offices and schools, nail salons and houses of worship, grocery stores and restaurants—
contribute to the sense, prevalent across America, that such a Violence could break out at any time, anywhere.
It feeds calls for gun control just as surely as it does the purchase of more and more guns
.
Public shootings fascinate the nation
, but they can also have the effect of
normalizing violence.
Criminologists say the prevalence of mass shootings is due in part to easy access to so many guns, a unique feature of the United States, as well as the
copycat effect.
Vigil outside the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park on Monday. Photo: Mark Abramson for The New York Times
“Would someone like that have committed a mass shooting in a dance hall in the past?” says Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, referring to the older man believed to have been the shooter in Monterey Park.
"Maybe not. You can think of it as a snowball effect. The more incidents there are, the more prominent this option will be in the minds of angry people."
And at the same time,
the recurrence of such gun violence
risks having the effect of numbing the nation to the tragedy, so much so that warnings not to get used to high-profile mass shootings are a familiar part of the response.
“We cannot become desensitized to these horrific acts of violence,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said after the Monterey Park shooting, which took place amid Lunar New Year celebrations over the weekend.
"The Year of the Rabbit represents hope."
There is little official consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting;
different organizations use different measures.
But so far this year, the vast majority of the 39 shootings in which at least four people were hit by bullets, the measure used by the Gun Violence Archive, a research group,
have attracted little or no attention
beyond areas where they occurred.
Flowers and candles placed near the door of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park.
Photo: Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times
Who outside of Houston would know that two such shootings have taken place there this year: a drive-by shooting in which four people were injured;
another that killed a person outside a Houston club and involved an AK-47-style assault rifle?
“It looks like over 50 shots were fired here, which is a very scary situation,” local sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters.
Such shootings often
make the evening news
, but fail to penetrate the mainstream consciousness of the cities where they take place, even as they leave victims and bystanders with
lasting injuries and mental scars.
“I was terrified, everyone was running,” said Carl Leon, a 25-year-old from Miami, as he described the moment the shooting began outside a Miami Gardens food restaurant earlier this month.
Leon, who promotes musicians on his Instagram account, had just finished appearing as an extra in a video shoot for rapper French Montana, he said, and was reaching into his pocket for keys when he was shot.
A bullet went through his left arm and abdomen.
"I thought I was going to die," he
said.
"It was the first time she was in a situation like this."
But the Miami Gardens shooting was not the first for his attorney, Josiah Graham, who represented one of the survivors of a Broward County bus shooting last year that killed two people and wounded two others.
It wasn't even the first mass shooting in the city of Miami Gardens this year.
Nine people were injured in a shooting at a party in the early hours of New Year's Day.
“In the old days, if you stayed away from certain things, you were good,” said Shanta Bonius, the mother of Carlos Wilkerson, 23, one of 10 people shot and injured, including Leon, outside the restaurant in Miami Gardens.
"Today, you could be minding your own business, going to the grocery store, and something happens."
The number of mass shootings has increased, though not steadily, since 2014, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks public reports of shootings.
There were 690 shootings with four or more victims in 2021, more than double the total for 2014. The number fell slightly last year, to 647, but remained significantly higher than previous years.
And the number of such shootings appears to be increasing in the first weeks of this year, compared to similar periods in recent years.
There has been, on average, less than one mass shooting per day from Jan. 1 through Jan. 23 in each of the past five years, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, but the past two years have seen a trend up, to 28 last year from 26 in 2021 and 16 in 2018.
nowhere safe
“There is
no place left in America
that is safe from gun violence,” David Min, a California state senator, said in response to the Monterey Park shooting.
"This has to stop.
Enough is enough," she said.
Despite declining crime rates, gun violence is on the rise, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the regional gun violence research consortium at the Rockefeller Institute for Government.
But Dr. Schildkraut said it was important to distinguish between "public mass shootings" like the ones in Monterey Park, which are known to
be premeditated
, and other categories, such as
murders between family members, retaliatory gang shootings,
or shootings that stem from an argument. .
Public mass shootings are the least common and
the deadliest
, he said.
And the type of policy interventions that are most likely to prevent them is different.
“All the gun violence and the loss of any one individual is too much,” Ms. Schildkraut said.
“They are different cubes that require us to think about their unique characteristics and add layers of prevention and response accordingly.”
A 2015 study linked the nation's high mass shooting rate to its high rate of gun ownership.
Americans make up about 5 percent of the world's population and
own 42 percent of the
world's guns, according to the study.
It is difficult to calculate the exact number of guns sold each year in the United States due to different state laws and purchasing scenarios.
But FBI data on the number of firearms background checks can serve as a measure.
By that count, they have risen to 40 million background checks in 2021 from 10 million in 2005.
But subsequent work suggests that the driving factor may be
easy access to guns
, not gun ownership, said Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who wrote the 2015 study.
Nearly 40 percent of American men tell investigators they own a gun, so gun ownership alone
is not a useful predictor
of who is likely to commit a mass shooting, Lankford said.
In a study of the 14 deadliest mass shootings since Columbine, he and a co-author showed that half of the perpetrators had not acquired their first firearm until the last year before the attack.
In many of the less reported mass shootings that take place in the United States, information about the gunman and the weapon used is not readily known.
After 12 people were shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend, three with what were described as life-threatening injuries, police implored people with information to come forward with information about the shooter.
In Rockford, Illinois, northwest of Chicago, three people were killed and two others injured in a shooting this month, and a suspect has yet to be publicly identified.
“You wish the same attention was paid to these everyday shootings,” Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said in an interview.
"I don't want to sound insensitive about Monterey Park, but at least those people will be remembered," he added.
“Last year I lost 15 lives in my community.
There was no national story about it.
It is sad that we live in a country where violence is normalized.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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