Why so many mass killings? Families, experts seek answers

More than five years after his son was gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Richard Berger still asks why.

Why Stephen Berger was killed the day after celebrating his 44th birthday. Why the gunman rained bullets over the Las Vegas Strip in 2017, turning a country music festival into a bloodbath. Why the massacre’s death toll didn’t shock U.S. leaders into doing more to prevent that kind of violence from happening again and again.

Why?

“It’s just a hole in our hearts,” Berger said. “We just don’t know, and we just don’t know what to say.”

For the Bergers, the families of the other 59 victims in Vegas — and relatives and friends of countless others slain in mass killings across the country in the years since — the questions loom just as large now as when the crimes happened. Yet the carnage continues.

Over the first four months and six days of this year, 115 people have died in 22 mass killings — an average of one mass killing a week. That includes the bloodshed Saturday at a Dallas-area mall where eight people were fatally shot.

The total represents the highest number of mass-killing deaths this early in the year since at least 2006, an Associated Press data analysis shows, and the deaths were already happening at a record pace before the horror unfolded in Texas.

The atrocities have been driven almost exclusively by gun violence, since all 22 of the incidents in 2023 involved firearms in some way. Mass shootings account for the vast majority of mass killings, though there are examples where the perpetrator used knives or other weapons as well.

Experts point to a few contributing factors: a general increase in all types of gun violence in recent years; the proliferation of firearms amid lax gun laws; the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, including the stress of long months in quarantine; a political climate unable or unwilling to change the status quo in meaningful ways; and an increased emphasis on violence in U.S. culture.

Such explanations are little comfort not only to the families ripped apart by the killings but to Americans everywhere who are reeling from the cascading, collective trauma of mass violence.

This year’s killings have happened in different ways, from family and neighborhood disputes to school and workplace shootings to explosions of gunfire in public spaces. They’ve taken place in rural as well as urban settings. Sometimes people knew their killers; sometimes they did not.

The bloodbaths are defined by the FBI as mass killings when the events involve four or more fatalities within 24 hours, not including the perpetrator. The Associated Press and USA Today have tracked and compiled extensive data on these violent attacks in partnership with Northeastern University.

The Las Vegas shooter’s motive remains unknown, even now. The high-stakes gambler was apparently angry over how the casinos were treating him despite his high-roller status, but the FBI has never uncovered a definitive reason for the slaughter, which ended with more lives lost than in any single mass killing in decades.

Contributing to 2023’s steady drumbeat of death: the grisly murder-suicide in Utah that left five children, their parents and their grandmother dead just days into the new year; the fatal shooting of six people, including three 9-year-old children, at an elementary school in Nashville; back-to-back rampages in California at dance studios and mushroom farms; and the mall shooting in Allen, Texas, on Saturday, when authorities say a gunman stepped out of a car and immediately started firing at people.