Four people were killed on Friday in a shooting at a Montana bar, prompting a lockdown in a neighborhood several miles away as authorities searched a wooded area for a suspect in the case.
The shooting brought the number of mass murders so far this year in the US to nine, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan resource which defines such cases as killings in which four or more victims are killed.
All those mass murders were shootings, and four have occurred in a 30-day period beginning 2 July. It was the US’s second mass murder since Monday, when a man attacked a New York City skyscraper housing the National Football League’s headquarters and shot four people dead before dying by suicide.
I’m not sure which is worse, that my first thought was “Only nine?” or that my second one was “Four counts as mass?”
I believe the lower threshold for a mass murder is three.
Three at one location… if you change locations it’s a killing spree.
Same. First thought was, “if that’s even remotely true, then we are doing way better than average.”
Luckily, these people don’t typically have great aim. From the same source there have been 256 mass shootings this year. Again, this means 4+ victims in an incident.