On July 23, authorities say a 59-year-old drifter named John Russel Houser walked into a Louisiana movie theater and shot 11 people, killing two, before shooting and killing himself.
It was the 204th mass shooting in the U.S. in 2015 on the year's 204th day, according to one crowd-sourced tracking of such events.
These statistics were compiled by the Mass Shooting Tracker, a project by the users of the Guns Are Cool subreddit, and first picked up by the Washington Post. The tracker defines "mass shooting" as: four or more people shot in one event.
Even as the roots of and solutions to such violence are fiercely debated, these statistics bear out their regularity.
According to the definition of mass shooting used in this AJC database (three or more people shot in one event), there has been more than one in Georgia this year — three were domestic murder-suicides, authorities have said.
And there have been at least six mass shootings in Georgia since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting of 2012, according to Vox, though those statistics have not been updated with some of the following events:
In January, a veteran Paulding County sheriff's deputy's stepson shot and killed him, as well as the deputy's wife and daughter, before killing himself, authorities said.
In February, a man in Douglas County shot and killed his ex-wife, her boyfriend and two children before killing himself, sheriff's officials said.
In July, a man in Forsyth County shot and killed his two young sons and his wife, and critically wounded his father-in-law, before shooting and killing himself, authorities said.
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