
When you hear on the news that a mass shooting has occurred, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For most Americans, it’s the horrific images that came out of school shootings like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. Or perhaps shootings in places other than schools like the Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas, or Buffalo.
The image of the killers has also become almost cliché…a deranged young man, often clad in black clothing, trying to gun down as many innocents as possible in a public place, usually without any personal grudge against the targeted victims.

When one of these heinous crimes happens lately though, those watching the news may hear something strange — the claim that this latest mass shooting is one of hundreds that year. For example, in an article published on May 31, 2022, The Trace’s headline read “There Have Been 17 Mass Shootings Since Uvalde.” Of course, the Uvalde shooting had happened only seven days prior to that date, so the article was claiming there had been 17 mass shootings in just the prior week. The article also claimed that there had been 230 mass shootings so far that year.
For most people, that probably sounded odd. No doubt mass shootings have become an all-too-common occurrence in America, but they certainly don’t feel that common. Surely, if 500 Uvalde-style shootings happened in a given year, we would have heard about them more than the three to four times a year mass shootings become national news.
Definitions shift based on the media’s current reporting objective
The confusion lies in the differing definitions of what constitutes a mass shooting and the political motivations behind those definitions. Muddying things further, the same news sources will sometimes use different definitions based on the point they’re trying to make at any given moment. For example, in a 2015 article, CNN reported that:
According to data compiled by Mother Jones magazine, which looked at mass shootings in the United States since 1982, white people – almost exclusively white men – committed some 64% of the shootings…Black people committed close to 16% of the mass shooting Mother Jones looked at, while Asians were responsible for around 9%. People identified as either Latino, Native American and unknown rounded out the study.
All of that is true, and while the article is ten years old, the data remains similar today. However, CNN also regularly reports numbers as seen in the following chart, which claims each year sees hundreds of mass shootings:

CNN gets this data from the Gun Violence Archive, which uses a far looser definition of what constitutes a mass shooting, defining it simply as incidents in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter. That ends up including far more gang-related shootings which are not what the general public considers to be a “mass shooting.”
Gang-related violence is obviously a major problem, but it doesn’t induce the sort of terror that major mass shootings do (which for the purposes of this article I will call “true mass shootings”). While unfortunate souls undoubtedly are sometimes injured or killed in the crossfire of gang shootouts, most Americans can generally avoid gang-related violence by not being involved in criminal activity, drugs, or being a gang member. It’s much harder to avoid some lunatic gunning you down for being in a grocery store, a nightclub, a movie, or a mall as happens in true mass shootings.
Focusing on gang-related violence also winds up skewing the racial categories of the perpetrators. As stated earlier, most mass shooters are white men. But that’s not the case if you use the expansive Gun Violence Archive definition, under which black men are dramatically overrepresented as the perpetrators and “mass shootings have disproportionately occurred in predominantly black neighborhoods.” Nor is that surprising, as it’s just another symptom of the black-on-black homicide problem that dominates American murder data that I have written about before.
So we see here one type of fork in the road — when the media wants to focus on the race of the shooter, they use true mass shootings. But when they want to inflate the number of mass shootings, they use the far looser GVA definition, which is mostly a database of gang-related violence.
There’s also a second fork in the road centering on the weapon of choice used by the shooters. If the goal of the reporting is to promote a ban on popular semiautomatic rifles, then we see headlines saying the AR-15 is “the weapon of choice for mass shooters” or that the “[l]atest mass shootings all have AR-15 in common.” And this is also more or less correct. While handguns were used to carry out some horrific crimes such as Fort Hood and the Virginia Tech shooting, semiautomatic rifles are overrepresented in that category.

But that’s only correct if we are talking about true mass shootings. Under the Gun Violence Archive definition, mass shootings overwhelmingly involve only handguns. If the media is going to go with that definition, they can’t also claim that AR-15s are mass shooters’ weapon of choice.
Looking at some of the shooting aggregators and how they define mass shootings
Gun Violence Archive (GVA)
The GVA is run by antigun activists who deliberately set out to change the definition of “mass shooting” to the much looser standard they have now successfully persuaded much of the major news media to adopt (at least some of the time).
That’s not to say the GVA doesn’t provide valuable data despite their antipathy to the right to keep and bear arms. I reference them all the time, and when it comes to maintaining an up-to-date archive of various types of gun-related crime, suicide, defensive gun uses reported in the media, and more, they are superb at what they do. But the user must be very conscious of their methodology when it comes to mass shootings.
To their credit, they don’t hide what they’re doing, as their website explains:
GVA uses a purely statistical threshold to define mass shooting based ONLY on the numeric value of 4 or more shot or killed, not including the shooter. GVA does not parse the definition to remove any subcategory of shooting. To that end we don’t exclude, set apart, caveat, or differentiate victims based upon the circumstances in which they were shot. GVA believes that equal importance is given to the counting of those injured as well as killed in a mass shooting incident.
But the result is that most of their “mass shootings” aren’t what the general public thinks of when they think of that term, so it winds up being very misleading when the media uses GVA’s definition without being clear why its numbers are so much higher than other counts.
For example, as of February 2, 2025, the most recent “mass shooting” in GVA’s database – which already has 25 so far this year – was the following incident:

A terrible event, no doubt, but not the sort of “mass shooting” Americans fear. Muddying the definition this way is unhelpful at best.
To be fair, GVA also tracks “mass murders” involving firearms, and that definition gets them a bit closer to true mass shootings. They define that category as “FOUR or more killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” There has (thankfully) been only one such event so far in 2025, a terrible mass murder of an entire family in a California home.
The Violence Project
The Violence Project gets far closer to true mass shootings with their criteria, which is:
We define a mass shooting as four or more people shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.
I think most would agree that’s a very reasonable definition and covers what most Americans think of when the term “mass shooting” is used.
Using this more specific definition, the Violence Project summarizes the total victims of mass shootings since the year 2000 as follows:
This passes the smell test. In 2017, the country was terrorized by some awful mass shootings such as Las Vegas and Southerland Springs. Sure enough, 2017 is the worst year on the Violence Project’s chart. By contrast, we had far fewer mass shootings in 2024 and, indeed, according to the chart, it was our most peaceful year since the pandemic year of 2020.
The violence project also provides comprehensive data about the suspects in mass shootings, how they acquired their weapons, and more. They also have data on the type of guns used. Handguns are at 49%, while “assault weapons” are used in 27%. They define “assault weapon” as “any semi-automatic firearm that broadly falls under the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban because it accepts a detachable magazine and includes one or more military-style features, such as a folding or telescoping stock.”
Mother Jones
The Mother Jones mass shooting database uses a definition very similar to that of the Violence Project, with the following criteria:

Because Mother Jones allows for a little more wiggle room, such as including incidents with three or more people killed (as opposed to four or more), it includes more incidents than the Violence Project. Which of the two is better comes down to personal preference. Both are valid sources, as long as you’re clear on the criteria.
Also note that one of the people who maintains the Mother Jones database has an excellent article arguing against the extremely expansive definition used by the Gun Violence Archive and others that I suggest you read.
An excerpt:
Gang shootings at nightclubs or house parties are a problem. Ditto abusive men gunning down their families in their own homes—a problem that occurs far more frequently than is generally understood, and one that we have also reported on extensively at Mother Jones. But while also important, these are distinct issues that require different analysis and solutions. (The same goes for the police shootings and other gun crimes we’ve covered.) Their impact on our society doesn’t begin to approach that of an event like the Aurora movie theater massacre, from the psychological to the financial. They aren’t the reason that school security is soon projected to be a $5 billion-a-year industry in the United States—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Umpqua Community College are that reason.
K-12 School Shooting Database
This database looks at school shootings specifically, but not just what the public consider a school shooting, as their net is much wider than that:
The K-12 School Shooting Database is a widely inclusive, open-source research project that documents when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason.
Obviously, that expansive definition includes much more than events like what happened at Uvalde or Parkland. Under this definition, an adult committing suicide with a firearm in a school parking lot when no children are present counts as a “school shooting.”
That’s so expansive as to be useless, yet CNN and others have used their numbers in some of their reporting, citing the K-12 database as their source.
Conclusion: Which definition is best?
While the Violence Project and Mother Jones are the best aggregators, they still aren’t quite satisfying because they manage to be under-inclusive by tying their criteria to the number of deaths.
For example, in 2022, a mass shooting occurred on the New York subway. Ten people were shot by a suspect wielding a handgun. Miraculously, none of those who were shot died. Because there were no deaths, the incident didn’t qualify for inclusion in the Violence Project or Mother Jones databases.
By any reasonable understanding of what constitutes a true mass shooting, the subway incident qualifies. It was an attacker trying to kill as many people as possible in a public place. The crime wasn’t gang-related nor did the attacker have any personal disputes with any of the intended victims.
I think the FBI’s definition of “active shooter” is ultimately what I am looking for:
The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Implicit in this definition is the shooter’s use of a firearm. The active component of the definition inherently implies the ongoing nature of an incident and thus the potential for a response to affect the outcome.
The annual active shooter reports the FBI publishes also note that various types of incidents are excluded, such as gang and drug-related violence and domestic incidents. Thus, they get us very close to the public’s understanding of what mass shootings really are.

Regardless of which definition or database is selected, the news media should always be clear on which one they’re using, as well as the competing definitions, so their readers or viewers aren’t mislead as to exactly how common these horrible events actually are.
I’ll conclude with this excellent infographic summarizing the various databases, including the ones I covered here as well as a couple I didn’t. Using 2021 as the reference year, it clearly shows how wildly different the various databases can be based on their respective methodologies.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.
Leftists only have one rule for language: words mean what I want them to mean when I want them to mean what I want them to mean.
Like their gender language is fluid and as such is meaningless while somehow simultaneously being of utmost importance.
In short they’re all rambling mental patients.
Reminds me I should probably reread Lewis Carroll for the Wonderland insights to the kind of thinking that surrounds me.
The core message in the book is, “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
After reading that exchange, I had learned all that the book had to offer, and put the book down; never looking back.
Definitions shift to whatever is politically-convenient…
Exactly. Whatever fits the narrative. Not a peep about the southern border with all the drugs coming through and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Damn those nasty guns.
Interesting article, but the point is that we can stop mass shootings entirely, through confiscation of all firearms held by lawful owners. Look at nations that do not allow private ownership of firearms; the mass shooting episodes are truly rare. But the core source of all gun crime, indeed, all crime is “the law”. No law, no crime. We need a national ban on law!