(KERO) — Eight people are dead after an employee opened fire at a San Francisco Bay Area transit agency. The San Jose shootings Wednesday occurred at the Valley Transportation Authority.
The mass shootings this year follow a lull in mass killings during the pandemic in 2020, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University. That database tracks mass killings defined as four or more dead, not including the shooter.
The FBI says a mass shooting is any incident that involves multiple victims of gun violence. It defines "victims" as both people who are killed and those who are injured by gunfire. Three people must have been injured or killed for the incident to qualify as a mass shooting.
You might remember some of the high-profile shootings we've seen across the country this year including those at a nail salon in Atlanta, Georgia, and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.
So far in 2021, we've already seen 232 mass shootings including the incident in San Jose on Wednesday.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The total number of people killed in America because of gun violence that year was close to 40,000. In 2020, there were 610 mass shootings across the nation. Roughly 43,000 people died because of gun violence in 2020.
In California, 27 people have been killed as a result of 18 mass shootings in 2021. Of those 18 shootings, six resulted in no deaths. The shooting on Wednesday in San Jose resulted in the most deaths with 9, including the shooter.
