About
This site counts American mass shootings, records the facts of each one, and links to the journalists who covered it. That is all it does.
What counts as a mass shooting
Four or more people shot in a single outburst of violence, not counting the shooter. Killed or wounded, both count. That is the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive and by the Mass Shooting Tracker, and it is the definition behind every number on this site.
This matters more than it sounds like it should, because there is no legal or official definition of a mass shooting in the United States, and the ones in circulation produce wildly different answers to what sounds like the same question.
The FBI does not define “mass shooting” at all. It defines mass murder, which requires four or more people killed, so a shooting that wounds a dozen people and kills nobody is not counted. Several newsrooms use a narrower standard still: four or more killed, in a public place, by a stranger, excluding robbery and domestic violence and anything connected to another crime. Under that standard the United States has around a dozen mass shootings a year. Under the standard used here, it has several hundred.
Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. The narrow one describes a specific and rare kind of event, the sort that becomes a national story for a week. The broad one describes how often four or more Americans get shot at the same time and place, which happens most days and almost never becomes a national story at all.
This site uses the broad definition because the quiet cases are the ones nobody is counting for you.
Where the numbers come from
The spine of this record is the Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced database maintained by volunteers, which logs each incident along with links to the news coverage that documented it. Their data is free to use and share. Those links are the reason this site can exist.
Street addresses and map coordinates come from the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that has tracked American gun violence since 2013.
Where an incident appears in both, the two records are merged into one. Where only one has it, it still gets a page, and the page says which source carried it.
How the counter works
The counter reads the number of days since the most recently recorded mass shooting. It is not a slogan and it is not fixed at zero. On most days it reads zero, because on most days there has been one. When there has not been one, it counts up honestly.
Since records began in 2013 it has never gone past ten, and that single ten-day stretch was in the database’s first year, when it was new and thinly sourced. Since 2020, when coverage became consistent, it has never gone past five.
It sometimes reads one early in the day and zero later. That is not an error. Volunteer databases lag the events they record by hours, so a shooting that happened this morning may not be logged until this afternoon.
What this site is not
It is not a memorial. Gun Memorial already does that work, and does it well. Victim names appear here only where a source database already published them, as part of the record, never as a tribute.
It does not host anyone else’s journalism. Every article is a link and nothing more: the outlet, and a way to get to their page. The reporting belongs to the newsroom that did it, and the traffic should go to them.
Corrections
Where the two source databases disagree on how many were killed or wounded, both figures are shown and the entry is marked. Nothing is averaged, nothing is rounded, and no figure is estimated to fill a gap. Where a count is unknown, the page says it is unknown rather than printing a zero.
These are public records assembled by volunteers, and they contain mistakes. If something here is wrong, say so and it will be fixed.