The number of active-shooter scenarios are rocketing skyward, according to a new FBI report, jumping from 40 during 2014-15 to 50 during 2016-17.
Moreover, the number increased from 20 in 2016 to 30 in 2017, with nearly 1,000 casualties in 21 states — a total of 221 killed and 722 wounded, for a total of 943, not including the shooters — and that doesn’t even count all gun deaths, the FBI said.
“This report does not encompass all gun-related situations,” said the federal law enforcement agency in an 18-page report, Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017.
“Rather, it focuses on a specific type of shooting situation. The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Implicit in this definition is the shooter’s use of one or more firearms.”
It’s a jump from such incidents in 2014-2015, when a total of 40 rampages in 26 states took the lives of 92 people and wounded 139. In both sets of years, 20 of the shootings met the further definition of “mass killing,” the FBI said.
The FBI report identified the 50 shooters in 2016-17 as “all male,” ranging in age from 14 to 66 years old. The previous two years showed 42 shooters, 39 men and three women.
Six of the shootings occurred in Texas, the FBI said, with five each in California and Florida, four in Ohio, and three in Maryland and Washington State.
Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin each saw two such incidents, and Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina logged one each.
The 2017 numbers were spiked, the FBI said, by the murder of 58 country music fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas; the gunning down of 49 revelers at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and the massacre of 26 worshipers at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The Las Vegas shooting was the biggest mass casualty incident, the report said, with 489 injured in addition to the deaths.
The latest report comes as the nation mourns anew at the most recent carnage, when an ex-Marine burst into Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and mowed down 12 people. The gunman also died, bringing the total fatality count to 13. More than a dozen were wounded. The club which was packed with college students and others enjoying a country music event,
According to a broader mass-killing definition by the Gun Violence Archive, an online repository of incidents culled from media, law enforcement, government and commercial sources, it was the nation’s 307th mass shooting in 311 days.
