These images impressively demonstrate how common mass shootings are in the US

Around 10 a.m. Monday morning in suburban Nashville, Tennessee: A 28-year-old trans woman stormed into a Christian private school and, according to police, shot herself with two assault rifles and a handgun. Three 9-year-old students and three staff members of an adult school are killed in the horrific act. Minutes later, the gunman was shot by police inside the school building. According to police, she herself was a former student of the Presbyterian school.

It is the third violent crime involving a gun in the United States in just days, as two people were killed in mass shootings in Little Rock, Arkansas and Philadelphia this weekend.

Unfortunately, as bad and extraordinary as the acts of violence are for the victims, their relatives and for the respective places, they are commonplace. Reports of major shootings have long since become the norm in the United States. On average, more than one violent act involving firearms and more than three victims occur per day.

The gory trail of these so-called “mass shootings” can be traced closely in the Gun Violence Archive, which is updated daily by a non-profit organization with data on gun-related deaths and injuries. The numbers are frightening: Since the beginning of 2014, there have been 4,171 mass shootings in the US, leaving 17,386 injured and 4,458 dead.

After a short drop in the number of shootings in 2018 and with it the number of injuries and deaths, the number of violent crimes involving firearms has increased sharply in recent years. In 2021 the US set a sad negative record with 690 mass shootings, 704 dead and 2829 injured, 2022 was also disastrous. After all, in 2023 the figures are somewhat lower than in previous years, but this year there were already 131 mass shootings with 193 deaths in the US.

Almost every day there must be a "mass shooting", according to a look at the calendar of last year and the current year. There is almost always a bang, especially on weekends: since January 2022, there has been no mass shooting for just eight weekend days.

A look at the interactive overview map shows that the states on the east coast are more affected by gun deaths than the states in the midwest or those on the west coast, with California being a sad exception. Most crimes take place in the metropolitan area or near the center of a large city, but gun-related tragedies also occur in rural areas time and time again.

Recently, there have been repeated calls for tougher gun laws — mostly following particularly brutal acts such as the massacre at a school in the small Texas town of Uvalde that killed 19 schoolchildren, two teachers, and the hitman last May.

The problem is now seen as a "mass shooting crisis", ie no longer as a collection of many individual cases, but as a continuously threatening phenomenon. But so far no political initiative has succeeded in curbing the number of guns and their owners. And there's no quick fix in sight any time soon, which means reports of "mass shootings" will unfortunately remain commonplace.