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There was a shooting at a children’s birthday party last weekend California The deaths of the four people were the 17th mass killing this year — the lowest number recorded since 2006, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press. USA Today In partnership with Northeastern University.
experts Cautioned that the decline does not mean that safe days have arrived and may simply represent a return to mean levels.
“Sir Isaac Newton Never studied crime, but they say, ‘What goes up comes down,” said James Allen FoxA criminologist at Northeastern University. The current decline in numbers, he said, is more likely what statisticians call “regression to the mean,” which represents a return to more average crime levels after an unusual increase in mass killings in 2018 and 2019.
“Will 2026 see a decline?”. Fox said. “I wouldn’t bet on it. What goes down must go back up.”
Mass murders — defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed in a 24-hour period, not including the killer — are tracked in a database created by the Associated Press and USA TODAY in partnership with Northeastern University. Fox, which manages the database, says mass killings declined by about 24% this year compared to 2024, which was a nearly 20% decline compared to 2023.
James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, said mass killings are rare, and that means the numbers are unstable.
“Because there are only a few dozen mass murders a year, a small change may seem like a wave or a decline,” Densley said, “when in reality it is a return to more typical levels.” “2025 looks really good in historical context, but we can’t pretend that means the problem is gone forever.”
But there are some things that may have contributed to the decline, Densley said, including the overall decline in homicide and violent crime rates, which peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said improvements in immediate response to mass shootings and other mass-casualty incidents could also play a role.
“There was a terrible shooting at Annunciation School in Minnesota in August, and that case doesn’t even fit the definition of mass murder because there were only two people killed but more than 20 injured,” Densley said. “But I learned from the response on the ground here that the only reason two people died was because of bleeding control and trauma response by first responders. And this happened on the doorstep of some of the best children’s hospitals in the country.”
Eric Madfis, a criminal justice professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, said crime is complex and academics are not good at assessing the reasons behind changes in crime rates.
“It’s multi-causal. It’s never going to be just one thing. People are still debating why the murder rate went down in the 1990s,” Madfis said. “It is true that gun violence and deaths from gun violence have declined, but we still have a much higher rate and number of mass shootings than anywhere else in the world.”
More states are devoting money to school threat assessments, Madfis said, with 22 states mandating the practice in recent years, and that could prevent some school shootings, though it would have no effect on mass killings elsewhere. None of the mass murders recorded in the database so far in 2025 occurred in schools, and only one mass murder was recorded in a school in 2024.
About 82% of this year’s mass murders involved a gun. Since 2006, 3,234 people have been killed in mass killings – and 81% of them were victims of shootings.
The Safe Communities Act passed in 2022 includes millions of dollars in funding for gun violence protection programs, said Christopher Carita, a former Fort Lauderdale Police Department detective and senior training specialist for the gun safety organization 97 Percent. Some states used the money to create social supports for people at risk of violence, and others used it for things like law enforcement and threat assessment programs. He said this flexibility has been key in reducing gun violence rates.
“It’s always been seen as a ‘gun problem’ or a ‘people problem’ and that’s been very controversial,” Carita said. “I feel like for the first time we’re seeing gun violence as a ‘both and’ problem on a national level.”
Emma Friedel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University, said focusing on extreme events like mass killings risks “missing the forest for the trees.” “If you look at firearm deaths, both homicides and suicides, the numbers are staggering. We lose the same number of people every year to gun violence as there were casualties in the Korean War. The number one cause of death for children is guns.
“Mass killings should be seen as part of the issue rather than the result of interests,” he said.