There have already been at least 146 mass shootings in America so far in 2023. Here's the full list.
- There have been 146 mass shootings in the US so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
- The latest mass shooting at Old National Bank in Louisville on Monday left four people dead.
Gun violence isn't slowing down in America.
The latest mass shooting — this time in Louisville, Kentucky — left four people dead and eight others injured after police say a gunman opened fire inside the Old National Bank building downtown. Police have said the shooting suspect is also dead.
The tragedy that unfolded at the Louisville bank on Monday was an undeniably familiar one.
So far this year, the US has seen at least 146 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the US. The months of January through April this year have already had more total mass shootings than the same period in the previous four years, dating back to 2018.
The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people are shot, not including the shooter.
This table includes the names, locations, and information about who was hurt in each mass shooting the Archive recorded in the US in 2023:
So far in 2023, the Archive recorded 11,521 deaths related to gun violence. In 2022, the Gun Violence Archive recorded 647 mass shootings and 44,287 total deaths from gun violence.
The United States is the only country in the world where there are more civilian guns than there are people, according to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), a Swiss research project.
SAS reports that there are 120 guns for every 100 Americans.
After each mass shooting, the issue of gun control gets renewed attention in politics and the media. Last June, in response to the Uvalde massacre in May that left 19 children and two adults dead, President Biden signed into law a bipartisan gun reform bill, the most significant of its kind in decades.
But some experts aren't convinced that the recently passed law will have much of an immediate effect on gun violence — at least not this year.
"It's a little bit hard to say at this point that it's gonna result in massive changes in the overall landscape of mass shootings," Kelly Drane told Insider. She said she expects that in 2023, "we'll see similar numbers to what we've seen in 2022 and in 2021" in terms of gun violence.
But it's not just mass shootings that make up gun violence in the US. Americans are 25 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than citizens in other high-income countries, according to the Giffords Law Center.
"Mass shootings, particularly like the one that we saw this past weekend, they represent a very, very small fraction of gun deaths in this country," Kelly Drane, the research director at Giffords Law Center, told Insider. "Americans are much more likely to die from gun suicide or to be shot in other forms of gun violence outside of mass shootings."
Stopping gun violence and mass shootings must happen at the systemic level, not the individual level, according to Dr. Daniel Semenza, the Director of Interpersonal Violence Research at the Rutgers Gun Violence Research Center.
"If you don't want to see this kind of level of gun violence and you want to stop seeing these headlines, then you have to bring in people into power who can make the decisions to start reducing access to the weapons that are causing this."
Dr. Semenza said that in the aftermath of shootings, like the one at Michigan State University, people tend to look for motive, wondering what drove the individual shooter to commit the attack.
But, he said, "Looking out for warning signs as an individual thing might feel like you're doing something, but at the end of the day, policy is gonna structure a lot of how this is going to move forward."