America's mass shootings are getting deadlier

Concertgoers take cover from shooting in Las Vegas.

(Image credit: David Becker/Getty Images)

published 2 October 2017

As of Sunday, the title of deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history is claimed by the horror in Las Vegas that left at least 50 people dead and hundreds more injured. Before the Vegas shooting, that grim honorific was held by 2016's Orlando nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were killed.

If it feels as if record-setting attacks are escalating faster than they used to, that's because they are. While violent crime overall is historically low, America’s mass shootings are getting deadlier, as The Washington Post shows in a graph plotting the spiking death tolls in mass shootings since 1949:

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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