It was 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday May 24 when an 18-year-old American boy opened fire about students and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Ulvalde, Texas. The toll is terrible: 19 children aged 7 to 10 and 2 adults killed. The perpetrator of this mass shooting was later shot dead by the police. A few hours later, Tuesday evening, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced that he was “time to turn pain into action” and called to “confront the gun lobby”.
It is already the third time this year (since the end of February) that an individual has opened fire and killed several people in a public place across the Atlantic. Have these shootings become more and more frequent in recent years? Who are the perpetrators of these mass killings, especially in schools? Franceinfo has analyzed the figures recorded over the past forty years.
Mass shootings are not a recent problem in the United States. But since 2010, the number of people killed during these tragedies has increased significantly. Over the past decade (since 2012), there have been 596 victims, which is more than in the previous thirty years, when 437 people were killed in shootings.
This is what emerges from the analysis of the database of the investigative magazine mother jones, which lists, since 1982, all the killings that have taken place in a public place in the United States with at least four victims (several shootings having made three victims are however also listed in their database). These figures also show that the last decade has seen a greater number of victims killed in schools.
This increase is not linked to a greater number of victims during each of these tragedies, but to the increase in the frequency of these events. Until 2011, there had never been more than five mass shootings per year. Since then, this threshold has been exceeded seven times (including more than ten killings perpetrated each year in 2017, 2018 and 2019).
Who are the perpetrators of these mass killings in the United States? Over the past forty years (the period observed by mother jones), they were almost exclusively men (123 of the 126 authors). As for the shootings perpetrated in schools, they were all committed by young men, even young boys.
Age is thus the other striking characteristic of the profile of perpetrators of mass killings in schools. More than half of the young men who opened fire in schools were aged 20 or younger, and almost all (17 out of 19) were under 30.