BS News: The United States has experienced its fewest mass killings in nearly two decades, with just 17 incidents recorded through the end of November 2025, according to a closely watched database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University.
The latest tragedy, a shooting at a childrens birthday party in California that claimed four lives over the weekend, became the 17th case to meet the databases strict criteria: four or more people killed within a 24-hour period, not counting the perpetrator.
That total marks the lowest annual figure since 2006 and reflects a roughly 24 percent decline from 2024, which itself had been about 20 percent lower than 2023.
James Alan Fox, the Northeastern University criminologist who has managed the database since its inception, described the drop as largely expected after several unusually active years.
We saw an abnormal spike in 2018 and 2019, Fox said. What we are seeing now is primarily a regression to the historical average rather than evidence of a permanent solution.
Because mass killings remain comparatively rare events, even small numerical changes can appear dramatic from year to year, experts note.
When the baseline is only a few dozen incidents annually, the difference of five or six cases can look like a major trend when it may simply be normal variation, said James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University and co-founder of The Violence Project.
Several factors appear to be helping keep the 2025 count down. Overall violent crime and homicide rates, which rose sharply during the pandemic, have fallen steadily since 2022. Improved active-shooter response protocols and advances in trauma care have also prevented some attacks from reaching the four-fatality threshold.
Firearms continue to dominate these incidents. Approximately 82 percent of this years mass killings involved guns, consistent with long-term patterns. Since the database began in 2006, more than 3,200 people have died in such attacks, and 81 percent of those victims were shot.
Notably, none of the 17 incidents in 2025 took place at a school. Only one school-based mass killing was recorded in 2024, a continuation of a recent downward trend that some researchers link to expanded threat-assessment programs now required or encouraged in more than 20 states.
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Federal funding from the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act has supported community violence intervention programs, enhanced background checks, and local prevention efforts in many states.
While the lower numbers offer a measure of relief, specialists emphasize that mass killings represent only a small slice of Americas gun violence problem.
These headline-making events should not distract from the thousands of firearm homicides and suicides that occur every year, said Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University. The daily toll remains far higher than in any other developed nation.
For now, 2025 stands as the quietest year for mass killings since the mid-2000s, but criminologists warn that without continued attention to root causes, the numbers could easily rise again in 2026.