NEW YORK (AP) – Slain at the hands of strangers or gunned down by loved ones. Massacred in small towns, in big cities, inside their own homes or outside in broad daylight.
This year’s unrelenting bloodshed across the United States (US) has led to the grimmest of milestones: The deadliest six months of mass killings recorded since at least 2006.
From January 1 to June 30, the nation endured 28 mass killings, all but one of which involved guns. The death toll rose just about every week, a constant cycle of violence and grief.
Six months. 181 days. 28 mass killings. 140 victims. One country.
“What a ghastly milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27 when a former student killed three children and three adults. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”
Leatherwood, a prominent Republican in a state that hasn’t strengthened gun laws, believes something must be done to get guns out of the hands of people who might become violent.
The shock of seeing the bloodshed strike so close to home has prompted him to speak out.
“You may as well say Martians have landed, right? It’s hard to wrap your mind around it,” he said.
A mass killing is defined as an occurrence when four or more people are slain, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. A database maintained by The Associated Press and in partnership with North-eastern University tracks this large-scale violence dating back to 2006.
The 2023 milestone beat the previous record of 27 mass killings, which was only set in the second half of 2022. A criminology professor at North-eastern University, James Alan Fox, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago.
“We used to say there were two to three dozen a year,” Fox said. “The fact that there’s 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic.” But the chaos of the first six months of 2023 doesn’t automatically doom the last six months. The remainder of the year could be calmer, despite more violence over the July Fourth holiday weekend.
“Hopefully it was just a blip,” said psychiatrist Dr Amy Barnhorst, who is the Associate Director of the Violence Prevention Research Programmes at the University of California, Davis. “There could be fewer killings later in 2023, or this could be part of a trend. But we won’t know for some time,” she added.
Experts like Dr Barnhorst and Fox attribute the rising bloodshed to a growing population with an increased number of guns in the US. Yet for all the headlines, mass killings are statistically rare and represent a fraction of the country’s overall gun violence.
“We need to keep it in perspective,” Fox said. But the mass violence most often spurs attempts to reform gun laws, even if the efforts are not always successful.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who is a Republican, had urged the General Assembly in the wake of the Nashville school shooting to pass legislation keeping firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, so-called red flag laws, though Lee said the term is politically toxic.
Getting such a measure passed in Tennessee is an uphill climb. The Republican-led Legislature adjourned earlier this year without taking on gun control, prompting Lee to schedule a special session for August.
Leatherwood, a former Executive Director of the Tennessee Republican Party and now the head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote a letter to lawmakers asking them to pass the governor’s proposal.
Leatherwood said he doesn’t want any other family to go through what his children experienced at the time of the shooting when they were in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. One of his kids, preparing for a recent sleep away camp, asked whether they would be safe there.
“Our child was asking, ‘Do you think that there will be a gunman that comes to this camp? Do I need to be worried about that?'” Leatherwood said.
The Nashville shooter, whose writings Leatherwood and other parents are asking a court to keep private, used three guns in the attack, including an AR-15-style rifle. It was one of at least four mass killings in the first half of 2023 involving such a weapon, according to the database.
