What do US mass shooting statistics look like when gang violence is excluded? How many mass shootings annually are actually targeting innocents?
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Executive summary
When researchers exclude gang- and crime‑motivated shootings, most major U.S. mass‑shooting databases count far fewer incidents and focus on “indiscriminate” public attacks — for example, Mother Jones and The Violence Project explicitly exclude gang‑related cases [1] [2]. Broader trackers like the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) count many more incidents because they include shootings with four or more people shot regardless of motive; GVA reported hundreds of mass‑shooting incidents in recent years while narrowly defined “mass killings” numbered in the dozens [3] [4] [5].
1. Definitions drive the numbers: whose shootings get counted?
Counting mass shootings depends on definitions. Mother Jones and The Violence Project adopt a narrow definition that excludes gang, drug, robbery or intimate‑partner motives to capture public, “indiscriminate” rampages [1] [2]. By contrast, Gun Violence Archive and crowd‑sourced trackers include any event where four or more people are shot at the same time and place, regardless of motive, which yields a much higher incident count [6] [7]. The FBI’s “active shooter” or some academic “mass killing” datasets use yet other thresholds [1] [5].
2. How many incidents fall away when gang violence is excluded?
Available sources show the practical result: narrow datasets produce far lower annual totals. For example, AP/Northeastern’s mass‑killing count was 17 incidents in 2025 — a low figure because that dataset counts incidents with four or more people killed and includes non‑public and family cases, while many mass‑shooting trackers that count people shot (not just killed) recorded several hundred incidents in 2025 [8] [3] [9]. Mother Jones’ longstanding database explicitly excludes gang‑related incidents to focus on public indiscriminate killings, which reduces the number relative to GVA’s totals [1] [10]. Exact subtraction (how many GVA incidents are gang‑related) is not stated in the provided sources; available sources do not mention a precise annual figure for incidents removed when gang violence is excluded.
3. Who’s being targeted in the narrower counts?
The datasets that exclude gang and crime‑motivated shootings are designed to isolate attacks that deliberately target bystanders or symbolic public locations — for example, school, workplace, house of worship or shopping areas [2] [11]. The Rockefeller Institute’s Mass Shooting Factsheet similarly excludes shootings tied to gang or militant motives, defining its cases as targeted violence against the public or symbolic sites [11] [12]. These are the incidents most often labeled “random” or “indiscriminate” in public debate [13].
4. How many annual mass shootings “target innocents”?
Sources disagree about labels and thresholds. Using narrow definitions (public, indiscriminate, motive not gang‑related), some research programs and journalism projects report only a few dozen to low‑hundreds of such incidents per year; using broader injury‑based definitions, counts rise into the hundreds [4] [3] [5]. For 2024–2025, GVA logged roughly 388–499 mass‑shooting incidents depending on the report, while AP/Northeastern’s mass‑killing database recorded just 17 mass killings in 2025 — illustrating the gap between “people shot” and “people killed” or “indiscriminate public attacks” [9] [3] [8].
5. Why the disagreement matters for policy and public perception
The narrow approach highlights lone, indiscriminate public attackers who fit the familiar “mass shooter” profile; advocates argue this pinpoints interventions like threat assessment and public‑space hardening [2] [9]. Critics say excluding gang and crime‑linked shootings understates the overall burden of multi‑victim firearm violence on marginalized communities and misleads about where deaths cluster [1] [13]. Databases that include all motives show the broader scope of multi‑victim shootings but mix problems that call for different responses [6] [13].
6. What the data cannot tell us from these sources alone
The provided sources do not supply a single, authoritative annual subtraction showing “X mass shootings per year drop when gang violence is removed.” Precise counts of incidents reclassified as gang‑related versus indiscriminate are not given in the materials provided; available sources do not mention a definitive numeric breakdown of mass‑shooting totals by motive for recent years [6] [3]. Any single headline figure depends entirely on which dataset and definition you accept [14].
7. Bottom line for readers
If you exclude gang‑ and crime‑motivated shootings, the number of mass‑shooting incidents focused on apparently random, public targets falls substantially — often to dozens or low‑hundreds depending on whether you count injuries or deaths — but there is no single consensus number because definitions differ across Mother Jones, GVA, Rockefeller, AP/Northeastern and academic teams [1] [7] [11] [8] [13]. Policymakers should be explicit about which harms they mean: indiscriminate public rampages, multi‑victim shootings broadly, or mass killings measured by deaths; each paints a different picture and implies different responses [2] [4].