There were 85 mass shootings in July—bringing the total of the year to 421—according to Gun Violence Archive, making it the worst month for mass shootings since last July, and the third worst since August 2020.
Police work the scene of a shooting on July 3, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where the suspect ... [+]
The July shootings killed 70 people and injured 397, according to a Forbes analysis of the data; Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which at least four people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter.
Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings across the country, said before 2020 it had never recorded a month with more than 60 mass shootings, but since then it’s happened 20 times.
The first seven months of 2023 saw more than 11,000 gun deaths and more than 22,000 gun injuries with 585 children and 3,325 teenagers shot, according to Gun Violence Archive.
- That’s how many more mass shootings there have been this year than there were at the same time last year when there were 385, Gun Violence Archive tweeted.
Seventeen mass shootings were reported over the Fourth of July weekend, including an attack in Shreveport, Louisiana, that left four people dead and at least six injured. President Joe Biden said “gun violence is tearing our communities apart” after that weekend and called for more bipartisan action to “address the epidemic of gun violence.” The following weekend saw four shootings that resulted in more than 30 people shot, again raising July’s totals. The country is continuing to record its fastest rate of mass shootings in recent history. If mass shootings continue at the rate they are going currently, they will likely exceed the number of shootings in 2021, which was the worst year for mass shootings since at least 2014, when the Gun Violence Archive first started tracking shooting data.