Mass Shootings in the US Since 1950 Resulting in Eight or More Murders
By 
This is the fourth time I’ve updated this post since Trump’s election. At that time, the statistics looked like this:
By decade
1950s: 0
1960s: 1 (University of Texas tower shooting)
1970s: 0
1980s: 6
1990s: 6
2000s: 7
2010s: 12 and counting
18 of these 32 mass shootings have taken place since 2007.
[Note: The linked data set doesn’t include “pure” domestic violence incidents, but only murders that involve or also involve the (relatively) random killing of relative strangers in a public place, although several of the listed incidents also included DV victims. A DV mass murder of eleven people in a home in Ohio in 1975 isn’t being counted, nor is a mass murder of ten people at a home in Brooklyn in 1984].
Now they look like this:
By decade
1950s: 0
1960s: 1 (University of Texas tower shooting)
1970s: 0
1980s: 6
1990s: 6
2000s: 7
2010s: 19 and counting
25 of these 39 mass shootings have taken place since 2007.
There have been as many of these shootings in the last 21 months as there were in any single decade prior to this one. We’ve gone from one such shooting every thirty years to one every three months. THERE HAVE BEEN MORE IN THE LAST 20 HOURS THAN THERE WERE COLLECTIVELY IN THE THIRTY YEARS BEFORE 1980.
Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.
In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course of making everyday life seem orderly and sensible, arbitrary things are made to seem natural and inevitable. Rituals, especially the rituals of childhood, are a powerful way to naturalize arbitrary things. As a child in Ireland, I thought it natural to take the very body of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread on my tongue. My own boy and girl, in America, think it natural that a school is a place where you must know what to do when someone comes there to kill the children.
Social science also teaches us something about how rituals end, although not enough. The most important step is to kindle a belief that there are other ways to live, other forms that collective life can take. That can be surprisingly hard to do, because a side-effect of ritual life is that participation in it powerfully reinforces its seeming inescapability, even when people are uncertain or disbelieving of the sense or meaning of what is happening. That is why change, when it comes, often comes suddenly and unexpectedly, as people finally acknowledge not just privately in ones and twos but publicly to one another that what they have been doing amounts to an empty parody that no-one really believes. A further difficulty is that this sort of sudden, collective collapse is in many ways the good outcome. A worse one is when solidarity is replaced with its bitter sibling, schism. Instead of competition or conflict within some framework that opponents are nevertheless bound to, real schism yields much of the febrile, effervescent energy of collective solidarity, but delivers few of its stabilizing benefits.
It’s traditional to say that there are “no easy answers”, but this is not really true. Everywhere groups face the problem of holding themselves together. Every society has its enormous complex of institutions and weight of rituals that, through the sheer force of mutual expectation and daily habit, bring that society to life. But not every society has successfully institutionalized the mass shooting. Only one place that has done that, deliberately and effectively. The United States has chosen, and continues to choose, to enact ritual compliance to an ideal of freedom in a way that results in a steady flow of blood sacrifice. This ritual of childhood is not a betrayal of “who we are” as a country. It is what America has made of itself, how it worships itself, and how it makes itself real.