According to the organization, there is a mass shooting if it concerns an incident in which four or more victims are killed with firearms, not including the perpetrator(s).
The most recent mass shooting in the country, Monday in the state of Kentucky, also happened at the gunman’s workplace. The 23-year-old perpetrator was working at the Old National Bank branch in downtown Louisville at the time of the shooting. Five people were killed, including the gunman himself. Nothing is known about his motive.
It Violence Project recorded 188 mass shootings nationwide between 1966 and 2021, 53 of which occurred in the workplace (over 30 percent). In 70 percent of the cases, the shooter was fired. The second most common locations of mass shootings are retail stores (16.9 percent), followed by restaurants and drinking establishments (13.4 percent).
Even without fatal shootings, the American workplace is violent. The nonprofit also collected data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that “20,050 private sector workers will be traumatized by non-fatal workplace violence in 2020.”