US has witnessed a growing number of fatal shootings this year with California seeing three mass shootings within a week.
In a shocking turn of events, a 72-year-old Asian immigrant man shot dead 11 people gathered for Lunar New Year at a suburban dance hall on Saturday night — before taking his own life as police closed in.
In another incident, Zhao Chunli, 66, was arrested in California after twin attacks at farms that left five men and two women dead.
The number of mass shootings in January is the highest number of mass shootings on record for any January, according to Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun-related deaths and injuries in the US. The organisation has tracked 40 such incidents in the US killing at least 69 this month and it has only been 27 days into the new year.
Record Gun-related Deaths
More people in the US are dying because of gun-related deaths than any other reason including terrorism.
In 2022 alone, there were an estimated 44,000 gun-related deaths in the US, which includes murder cases, accidents and self-defence. Moreover, there were 648 mass shootings last year, 21 of which involved five or more fatalities.
According to Gun Violence Archive, there were 1,987 mass shooting incidents in the US since 2020, where four or more people were killed or injured.
A 2014 report said that for every one American killed by an act of terror in the US or abroad that year, more than 1,049 died because of guns.
Bullying and Harassment
But why is the US seeing more mass shootings in the recent months. The reasons are many, but a deeper analysis shares a common occurrence in such incidents- harassment and bullying endured by the accused.
In the recent California farm shooting on January 23, the suspect Zhao Chunli said he had endured years of bullying and overwork, but his complaints were never addressed, NBC Bay Area’s Janelle Wang reported.
“He described to me that he believes that he suffers from some sort of mental illness. He’s struggled with that for a while and he says on Monday he was not in his right mind,” a US reporter who visited the suspect in jail said.
San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe said the evidence in the case points to this being an instance of workplace violence.
In the November 2022 Walmart shooting, a 31-year-old overnight manager at Walmart who killed six people at a Virginia store wrote a “death note” before dying by suicide.
The “death note” on Andre Bing’s phone read, “Sorry God I’ve failed you, this was not your fault but my own,” it said. “I was harassed by idiots with low intelligence and a lack of wisdom.”
However, reports said that Bing had bullied, threatened and harassed employees and that he frequently acted “inappropriately, bizarrely and dangerously.”
Similarly in the Texas shooting in May 2022, the shooter who killed 22 people, including 19 children, was a victim of bullying and had dropped out of school on numerous occasions due to bullying.
18-year-old Salvador Ramos was bullied “over a childhood speech impediment” and “suffered from a fraught home life”.
According to a survey by Alfred University in New York, which studied the reason behind school shootings, bullying was listed as the second highest reason by the students behind such incidents. 86 percent of the respondents said that the reason behind the shooting was “other kids pick on them, make fun or them, or bully them” while the highest listed reason was revenge.
Elderly, Asian gunmen outlier in mass shootings
A new report by the US Secret Service, which studied 173 violent attacks in public spaces from 2016 to 2020, concluded that the average age of attacker in mass shootings was 34. The typical profile for a shooting in a public space with a large number of casualties is a white male under 40 — and white men under 21 have featured particularly in some of the most recent.
However, the two recent tragedies in California stand out for their difference: the alleged attackers were men of Asian descent, both elderly. According to the study, only four percent of the attackers were Asian.
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