334 days, 351 mass shootings: Charting the rise of America's gun violence

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The nation was once again gripped by gun violence on Friday after a gunman identified by authorities as Robert Lewis Dear Jr. stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing two civilians and one police officer and injuring nine others.

It is just the latest in a year of more-than-daily mass shootings in America. In fact, there had already been one mass shooting on Friday -- in the early morning hours, two people were killed and two injured in a shooting at a restaurant in Sacramento, California. Another mass shooting incident in Boston in the early hours of Thanksgiving Day took the life of an MBTA rail conductor.

There have been at least 351 mass shootings so far this year, according to news reports collected by a reddit community that tracks these incidents. The reddit tracker defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire. The Mass Shooting Tracker is different from other shooting databases in that it uses a broader definition of mass shooting -- the old FBI definition focused on four or more people murdered as part of a single shooting.

There were at least 12 mass shootings in the U.S. last week so far, counting the Colorado Springs shooting. That shooting would also be the second mass shooting in Colorado Springs this month.

The number of mass shootings so far this year has already surpassed the total number of mass shootings in 2014, according to the tracker. And the pace is well above 2013's pace, when a total of 363 mass shootings occurred.

Washington Post