June 17, 2016
Is the massacre in Orlando the worst mass shooting in United States history? News organizations and government officials have said so since Sunday, when a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at a gay nightclub there.
The question has reverberated online and in news broadcasts, with some protesting that characterizing Orlando as the worst ignores an ugly history of attacks that claimed more lives, most often involving white aggressors and black or Indian victims.
Experts who study violence caution that terms like “mass shooting,” “mass killing” or even “active shooter” can be murky, and that different people use them differently. But by the definitions generally used in their field, they say, the carnage in Orlando does make it the worst mass shooting.
There have been worse acts of violence that did not involve guns, of course, like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. And in the more distant past, there were outbursts that were deadlier than the Orlando shooting, whether in the category of terrorism, race riot, pogrom, ethnic cleansing, genocide or military action.
In Colfax, La., in 1873; in East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917; and in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921; mobs of white people attacked and killed large numbers of black people. In 1857, a Mormon militia attacked settlers in a wagon train at Mountain Meadows in the Territory of Utah. In 1890, a cavalry regiment gunned down Lakota men, women and children on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In each case, there is disagreement over how many people died, and no certainty about how many were shot, but by most estimates, the death toll was higher than in the Orlando attack.
As a result, some have objected to calling the Orlando mass shooting the worst. The National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, for example, issued a joint statement asking reporters to stop using the superlative, “which negates several other incidents in U.S. history, many involving minority victims.”
“You can probably point to some incidents where more people were shot than in Orlando,” said J. Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, and an author of
of active-shooter attacks. “But for our purposes, they’re in a different category. We would consider this to be the worst mass shooting in the United States.”
Disputes over how to define mass shootings are serious enough that experts disagree about whether they are on the rise. Some researchers exclude domestic attacks, but not others. Some say that only the acts of lone gunmen can qualify; others say that a small group of people can carry out a mass shooting if they prepare and act together.
“That’s quite different from having a militia or a mob,” said James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and the author of multiple books on killers. “Mob violence, in particular, is often spontaneous, reactive, and all the people who are shooting aren’t coordinating their actions.”
Dr. Fox said that to him, hallmarks of mass killings included planning and “the specific intent to cause a blood bath.”
Deborah Azrael, an author of a Harvard School of Public Health
, said that making such distinctions was often a judgment call, but necessary.
“If you want to get at why these things happen, you want to compare apples to apples as much as you possibly can, so you try to disaggregate, to distinguish between different kinds of incidents,” said Dr. Azrael, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
But detailed, caveat-laden definitions do not roll off the tongue as readily as “mass shooting.”
By the definitions used by people in his field, Dr. Fox said, the mass shooting in Orlando was the worst in United States history, but he added, “I don’t think there’s any value in saying so.”
“Whether it’s a record or not really shouldn’t matter; it doesn’t make it any more tragic,” he said. “And if we talk constantly about records, someone out there is going to want to break the record.”
