The deadly shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, where 10 people were killed, including a police officer, was the second mass shooting in the United States in less than a week.
On Tuesday, a sniper killed eight people – six of them women of Asian descent – in three spas in the Atlanta, Georgia area.
Until that shooting in Atlanta, it had been a year since there was a large-scale shooting in a public place. In 2018, the year a gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, there were 10 mass shootings where four or more people were killed in a public setting.
The following year, when a sniper targeting Latinos in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people, there were nine.
“These were the worst years on record,” said Jillian Peterson, associate professor of criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and co-founder of the Violence Project, a research center that studies armed violence.
But before the shootings in Atlanta last week, there have been no such murders since March 2020, according to the Violence Project.
Other types of armed violence increased significantly in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There were more than 600 shootings in which four or more people were shot by one person, compared to 417 in 2019. Many of those shootings involved gang violence, fights and domestic incidents, where the perpetrator knew the victims, said Professor Peterson.
Initial research suggests that widespread unemployment, financial stress, increased addiction to drugs and alcohol and the lack of access to community resources caused by the pandemic contributed to the increase in shootings in 2020.
The police did not say what may have motivated the sniper in Colorado, who is in custody.
In Atlanta, the shootings triggered calls to stop hate crimes against Asian Americans, which increased during the pandemic. Some attributed this increase to the words used by former President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly called the coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan, China, “the Chinese virus”. Police have not ruled out prejudice as a motivating factor in the shooting, although the suspect has denied such racial animosity, officials said.