April 26, 2026

U.S. MASS SHOOTINGS (2026 + FIVE‑YEAR CONTEXT) USING THE BROADEST CONSISTENT DEFINITION

(GVA: 4+ shot, injured or killed, excluding the shooter)

2026 YEAR‑TO‑DATE (BROAD DEFINITION)

98 mass shootings as of March 31, 2026 (4+ shot)
115 killed, 377 wounded in those incidents
GVA real‑time logs show dozens more incidents through April, confirming the pace remains high.

This is the broadest, most inclusive definition used by researchers and journalists because it captures all incidents where multiple people are shot, not just killed.

FIVE‑YEAR COMPARISON (BROAD DEFINITION ONLY)

Using the same GVA-style criteria (4+ shot), the pattern looks like this:

2026: 98 incidents by March 31 (on pace for 500–700+ by year end)
2025: Hundreds of incidents (Mother Jones confirms their own count is intentionally narrow and excludes most shootings)
2024: Hundreds of incidents (GVA trendline; definitions vary but totals remain high)
2023: 659 mass shootings (GVA definition)
2022: 503 mass shootings (GVA definition)

Important:
Mother Jones, Everytown, and the FBI all use fatality‑based definitions (3–4+ killed), which produce dramatically smaller numbers. Mother Jones explicitly states their definition is a “conservative measure of the problem” and excludes many events.

WHY THE NUMBERS LOOK “HAZY”

1. Different organizations count different things

GVA: 4+ shot (injured or killed), excluding shooter — broadest and most reflective of lived reality.
Mother Jones: 3–4+ killed, public, excludes many categories — tiny numbers.
FBI / CRS: 4+ killed — mass killing, not mass shooting.
Mass Shooting Tracker: 4+ shot including shooter — even broader than GVA.

There is no universally accepted definition, and each dataset excludes different types of events.

2. Definitions erase entire categories of violence

The Injury Epidemiology study recommends a standard definition that includes both fatalities and non‑fatalities because current definitions distort the true burden.

3. Most definitions ignore intent, terror, and social impact

Definitions generally exclude:

the number of people targeted
the number of shots fired
the level of community trauma
injuries sustained while fleeing gunfire
psychological or medical consequences after the event

This means a shooter can fire into a crowd, hit no one, and the system will say:
“Not a mass shooting.”

THE PARALLEL: “AT LEAST HE DOESN’T HIT YOU”

The definitional logic behind mass‑shooting statistics mirrors the interpersonal minimization pattern:

“At least he doesn’t hit you.”
“At least no one was shot.”

Both collapse violence into visible injury, erasing:

intent
coercion
terror
dominance
field distortion
the forced reorientation of community safety

A shooter who fires into a crowd but hits no one is still performing the same social act:

asserting power
demonstrating impunity
imposing fear
rewriting the social field

But because the bullets didn’t land, the system treats it as if nothing happened.

This is how violence becomes statistically invisible even when it is socially overwhelming.

CLOSING

When the system only counts the hits, it erases the violence.
When the violence is erased, the conditions that produce it normalize.
And the threshold for what “counts” keeps rising —
while the people living inside the field feel the distortion long before the data ever acknowledges it.