- America has recorded 609 multiple-victim shootings so far in 2022, according to The Gun Violence Archive.
- It's the third year in a row that the country has surpassed 600 mass shootings.
The US set a chilling record earlier this month amid a spate of recent mass shootings: This year marks the third in a row that the country has recorded more than 600 multiple-victim shootings, according to gun violence data.
The Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs that left five people dead and 17 wounded on Sunday marked the 601st mass incident in 2022, according to The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks and records shootings and gun violence throughout the country.
The archive calls mass shootings an "American phenomenon," and defines the incidents as any attack in which there are at least four victims shot, injured, or killed by a gun, excluding the perpetrator.
Tragedy struck again just two days after the Club Q shooting when a Virginia Walmart manager opened fire at a store in Chesapeake, according to authorities, killing six employees and marking the 607th multiple-victim shooting in 2022 thus far.
As of Thanksgiving day, there have been 609 mass shootings this year.
With more than a month left in the year, the US is on pace to reach 675 mass shootings before 2022 ends, according to The Gun Violence Archive, which would be the second-highest number of multiple-victim shootings since the nonprofit started tracking gun violence in 2013.
—The Gun Violence Archive (@GunDeaths) November 20, 2022
The archive recorded 690 mass shootings in 2021 as gun violence peaked while the Covid-19 pandemic abated, and 610 shootings in 2020.
"GVA had never logged a month of 60+ mass shootings before 2020," the nonprofit tweeted after the Club Q shooting. "It happened five times in 2020, six times in 2021, and now six times again this year."
The data paints a disturbing picture of increased gun violence in the last eight years.
In 2014, the archive recorded 273 mass shootings. By 2017 — just five years ago — that number had jumped to 348. There was another significant increase between 2019, which saw 417 multiple-victim incidents, to 2020, in which there were 610 recorded mass shootings.
The 2022 statistics come out to an average of 1.86 mass shootings per day, The Gun Violence Archive said.
Following the Colorado shooting, President Joe Biden condemned the "senseless attack," and urged the country to "address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms."
"Earlier this year, I signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades, in addition to taking other historic actions," Biden added. "But we must do more. We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America's streets."