The United States experienced a record number of mass killings in 2019: 41 killings have been recorded in the database maintained each year since 2006 by the agency Associated Press, as well as by USA Today and Northeastern University in Boston. A figure that exceeds the sad record of 38 killings in the year 2006. Further research shows that this figure is also the highest since the 1970s.
Defined as having killed at least four people (excluding the perpetrator), these mass killings now structure public life in the United States and continue to fuel the old debate over gun control, which causes the vast majority of these massacres. Of the 41 mass killings recorded in 2019, 33 were committed by firearms.
In total, these 41 events killed 211 people, a very high figure but less important than in 2017, the year in which 224 people lost their lives in these killings, including 58 alone in the massacre perpetrated in Las Vegas, the largest mass killing in the history of the country.
Majority of killings in private places
According to this database, and contrary to what one might think, most of these killings are not the subject of national media coverage, except when they take place in public space (9 killings), as was the case at El Paso (supermarket), Dayton (in front of a bar) in August or Virginia Beach (public building) in June. The majority of these events, on the contrary, involved assassinations in private places and killers who knew their victims (family, colleagues, gangs).
The published data fairly well match the research results of James Densley, a researcher in criminology at the Metropolitan State University of Saint Paul (Minnesota). "What makes this figure so exceptional is that mass killings are increasing while homicides are on the decline", according to Mr. Densley.
For the researcher, crime experienced several waves in previous decades: the 1970s and 1980s saw their share of serial killers, the 1990s were marked by school killings and the 2000s by violence terrorism. "It seems to be the age of mass killings", according to James Densley.
A contagion phenomenon
A phenomenon partly explained by the contagion effect highlighted by Mr. Densley and Alan Fox, criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, that is to say the fact that these events inspire other killers and cause other killings. “These events are rare. Risk is clearly low, but fear is important, according to Mr. Fox. And what feeds the contagion is fear. "
In fact, mass killings obey, like all human behavior, the logic of social copying, that is to say that our behaviors depend largely on those of others, present in our immediate environments (family, friends ) but also in more distant behavior such as that of other killers, whose media coverage in our societies considerably increases the scope.
However, according to a study published in July 2015 in Public Library of Science, researchers from the universities of Arizona and Illinois have shown that mass killings are indeed contagious and therefore prone … to epidemics. These studies explain that each event increases the probability of a next killing a little more in the following thirteen days.
