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20 weeks into the year, the U.S. has already seen 213 mass shootings
Updated 15:33, 25-May-2022
CGTN

The Texas elementary school shooting, which left 19 children and two adults dead, came just 10 days after the events in Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were gunned down in a supermarket.

It is also the 213th mass shooting in the U.S. in 2022, according to a database run by Gun Violence Archive (GVA). The nonprofit research group views an incident as a mass shooting if four or more people are shot, wounded or killed, excluding the gunman. 

With just over 19 weeks into the year, the 213 mass shootings average out to about 10 such attacks a week.

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Live: At least 21 killed in Texas school shooting, gunman dead

The assault at Robb Elementary School in the heavily Latino town of Uvalde was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. grade school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, AP reported.

According to CNN, the Texas elementary school shooting marks at least the 30th shooting at a K-12 school in 2022. So far this year, there have been at least 39 shootings in K-12 schools, colleges and universities, resulting in at least 10 deaths and 51 injuries.

The shooting has again shown that the recurrent and deep-rooted problem of gun violence in the United States is aggravating.

As of Tuesday, over 31,300 people have died or been injured due to gun-related incidents in the U.S. this year, according to GVA.

Besides, the perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S. are mainly middle-aged and trending younger. The average age of the killers was 33.5, though the youngest was a mere 11 years old, according to an analysis of 128 cases from 1982 to 2022 conducted by Mother Jones magazine, which created an open-source database documenting mass shootings in the U.S. 

U.S. think tank Rand Corporation echoed this finding in an essay titled "Mass Shootings in the United States." 

It said the perpetrators "are most commonly younger than age 45 (82 percent); more specifically, 26 percent of mass public shooters from 1976 to 2018 were younger than age 25, 27 percent were aged 25 to 34, and 29 percent were aged 35 to 44."  

(With input from agencies)

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