Fact check: Have mass shootings decreased in the US since 2022 law?

Senator Chris Murphy, a starring protagonist of stricter weapon laws, said hours aft an August 27 deadly Minneapolis schoolhouse shooting that authorities enacted during the Biden medication led to a diminution successful wide shootings.

“There is thing profoundly incorrect with a state that chooses to marque moving for their lives portion of kids’ backmost to schoolhouse ritual,” Murphy wrote connected X. “When we yet passed a weapon information measure successful 2022, wide shooting began to drop. But it was an unacceptably tiny start. We indispensable bash more.”

Murphy referred to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that then-President Joe Biden signed into instrumentality successful June 2022 aft wide shootings successful Buffalo, New York and a Uvalde, Texas simple school. The authorities combined weapon information provisions with intelligence wellness and schoolhouse information resources and marked the archetypal legislature weapon power measurement successful astir 3 decades.

In Minneapolis, Robin Westman fired done the windows of the Church of the Annunciation during a greeting wide to people the opening of the schoolhouse year, sidesplitting 2 children and injuring 18 different people. Westman, 23, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Murphy’s spokesperson said the legislator referred to the fig of wide shootings arsenic measured by the Gun Violence Archive, an online database that showed a alteration successful wide shootings successful 2024 compared with 2023. However, assessing whether the 2022 instrumentality caused the alteration is hard to determine. Experts said the instrumentality mightiness person played a role, but they are unaware of world probe addressing that question.

“This is not to accidental that it whitethorn not person immoderate interaction – it’s virtually intolerable to show immoderate nonstop causality, but it’s important to support successful caput galore different imaginable correlates of that drop, including, for example, an wide driblet successful crime, instrumentality to prevention and involution strategies and truthful forth,” said Alex R Piquero, a University of Miami prof of criminology and erstwhile manager of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

No authoritative explanation of wide shootings

There is nary wide agreed upon explanation for wide shootings. Different groups measurement wide shootings successful varying ways based connected the fig of radical injured oregon killed. Some exclude pack unit oregon home unit from their counts and see lone indiscriminate violence, erstwhile a shooter fires a weapon astatine random successful public. This means that wide shooting numbers tin alteration importantly depending connected the metrics – showing anyplace from dozens oregon less incidents to hundreds successful a fixed year.

The Gun Violence Archive defines wide shootings arsenic events successful which astatine slightest 4 radical are injured oregon killed, excluding the shooter. As of August 27, the archive recovered 642 wide shootings successful 2022, 660 wide shootings successful 2023, 503 successful 2024 and 286 year-to-date successful 2025.

Some different wide shooting trackers besides amusement a diminution from 2023 to 2024, though they person narrower methodologies that effect successful smaller earthy numbers.

Mass shootings person decreased but law’s interaction is unclear

Gun unit experts expressed caution astir attributing the diminution successful wide shootings to the 2022 instrumentality for respective reasons:

The 2022 instrumentality had galore components. It’s hard to property the alteration to the instrumentality due to the fact that the instrumentality “had truthful galore antithetic parts”, including wealth to enactment state-level “red flag” laws, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, enforcement manager of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium astatine the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Red emblem laws let courts to temporarily region a person’s firearms if the idiosyncratic poses a information to different people.

Proving a transportation would impact analysing changes collectively and implicit antithetic initiatives implicit a overmuch longer play of time, Schildkraut said.

Mass shootings are rare. Because they are statistically precise rare, “it is hard to separate alteration owed to thing similar the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act from random saltation implicit time,” said Veronica Pear, adjunct prof astatine the Centers for Violence Prevention astatine University of California, Davis.

Terry Schell, a elder behavioural idiosyncratic who studies firearms and unit astatine Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan deliberation tank, said: “It is exceptionally hard to determine, empirically, if immoderate nationalist instrumentality caused a peculiar displacement successful a uncommon outcome. Even if the wide shooting complaint dropped to zero successful the years pursuing passage, each that would archer america is that SOMETHING happened successful 2023 to trim wide shootings. It could beryllium this law; it could beryllium thing wholly different.”

Schell said to marque claims astir causation requires information that allows researchers to regularisation retired alternate causes.

Our ruling

Murphy said, “When we yet passed a weapon information measure successful 2022, wide shooting began to drop.”

He pointed to Gun Violence Archive information showing 503 wide shootings successful 2024, a diminution from 660 successful 2023. Midway done 2022, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law.

Gun unit experts said they are unaware of probe showing the interaction of the instrumentality connected wide shooting numbers. They cautioned that the instrumentality had galore components and assessing its interaction connected wide shootings is difficult.

The connection is partially close but leaves retired important details. We complaint it Half True.

Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this information check.