MAP: 26 Mass Murders Across America in 30 Years

The horrific slaughter at a movie theater in Colorado is the latest in an epidemic of gun violence.

—By

| Fri Jul. 20, 2012 7:32 PM PDT
Outside the Colorado theater where a gunman killed 12 people on July 20. Eric Bellamy/ZUMAPRESS.com

It's perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday is the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 26 mass murders across the United States. We have mapped them below, including details on the shooter's identity, the date of the event, and the number of victims injured and killed. We do not consider the map comprehensive (and there are countless incidents of deadly gun violence in America, of course). We used the following criteria to identify incidents of mass murder:

• The killings were carried out by a lone shooter (except in the case of the Columbine massacre, which involved two shooters).
• The shootings happened during a single incident and in a public place (except possibly in the case of a deer hunter in Wisconsin who killed his victims after a trespassing dispute).
• The shooter took the lives of at least four people (an FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—as opposed to a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident, and typically in a single location).
• If the shooter died or was hurt from injuries sustained during the incident, he is included in the victim count.

Sources: Associated Press, Canada.com, and additional research by Mother Jones.

For the latest on the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, jump over to our updated explainer.

Editor's note, 11:30pm PDT: Thanks to all our great readers for the comments, and for flagging several other mass murders that fit the above criteria. We will update the map data soon to include the Xerox killings in Hawaii, the Westside Middle School killings in Arkansas (involving two shooters, like Columbine), the Trolley Square killings in Utah, and the Northern Illinois University killings. (We chose not to include Mark O. Barton in Atlanta, Richard Baumhammers in Pittsburgh, or the Red Lake reservation massacre in Minnesota, whose perpetrators are classified as spree killers.)

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