Nov 11, 2014 3 min read

It’s a long, strange journey America traveled over the last three or four decades. It used to be the disgruntled, deranged loners of this world, typically men in their 20s, would try to purge whatever demons were swirling in their psyches by killing, or attempting to kill, a public figure, whether it was Arthur Bremer’s pathetic bid for notoriety by gunning down and paralyzing Alabama Gov. George Wallace as Wallace campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, or Mark Chapman insisting the J.D. Salinger novel “The Catcher in the Rye” provided a justification for his killing former Beatle John Lennon eight years later.

We can be thankful, from all indications, that particular storm went out to sea. But it seems to have been replaced by a different kind of tempest – a new generation of disgruntled and deranged loners, still usually men, engaging in acts of psychotic purgation by killing many people at once. Rather than a roll call of public figures that were lost to gun violence, such as the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Lennon, we now have a list of places where many, not-so-well-known people perished from gunfire – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech.

If it seems like we have experienced more of these types of shootings, it’s not merely a function of these incidents ricocheting relentlessly through the 24/7 media churn. A new study released last month by Harvard School of Public Health found, yes, the number of mass shootings increased over the last couple of years.

Excluding altercations where several people were killed at once in the midst of domestic disputes or gangs warring over turf, the study found incidents where three or more people were killed at once by a gunman they did not know became three times more common since 2011.

The study found, in 1982, a mass shooting in public tended to happen about every 200 days, meaning almost seven months would elapse before a story about a mass killing would get into the newspapers. Since 2011, however, the study found the rate accelerated to about one mass shooting in the United States every 64 days or so, putting them two months apart.

These findings jibe with a recently issued FBI report which also found the rate of mass shootings increased in recent years.

Though the authors of the study didn’t specify a single cause for the increase in mass shootings, they caution it’s not likely because of any kind of increase in mental illness – if anything, they say, mental illness is more effectively treated than it once was. We can assume there are some copycats out there, who see the headlines mass shootings generate and think, “Hey, I’ll go out in a blaze of glory and the world will know all about my grudges and resentments.” But that doesn’t mean the media cannot cover these tragedies. If reporters and editors exercise restraint, they can offer clarity and insight, especially when online forums and social media can be aflame with speculation and misinformation.

One way to curb these mass shootings would be if we no longer tolerated them the way we now do. We tend to treat these events like the weather – something that can spoil our day, but nothing we can do anything about. To be sure, if we reinstituted a ban on assault weapons or made licensing and training more rigorous, overall gun violence would not decrease overnight. It would take time, probably years.

But we have to start somewhere. And soon.