50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons - Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/mass-shootings-in-america
he death tolls change, the places change: 26 at a church, 26 in an elementary school, 49 in a nightclub, 58 at a country music festival. The faces in the memorial photos change every time.
But the weapons are the common denominator.
Mass killings in the United States are most often carried out with guns, usually handguns, most of them obtained legally.
There is no universally accepted definition of a mass shooting, and different organizations use different criteria. In this piece we use a narrow definition and look only at the deadliest mass shootings, beginning Aug. 1, 1966, when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and killed 14 more people before police shot him to death. The numbers here refer to 132 events in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (or two shooters in three cases). An average of eight people died during each event, often including the shooters.
