Retail shootings

The first retail shooting of the modern era took place in 1966 at a salon on a beauty school campus in Mesa, Arizona.

The shooter opened fire on a group of cosmetology students, and a customer and her children, killing five people, including a toddler.

The 1966 attack in Mesa was considered the first copycat mass shooting in the country. The perpetrator sought fame and appeared to emulate the massacre at the University of Texas, which took place three months earlier and received widespread media attention.

One in five mass shooters (22%) studied other mass shooters, according to The Violence Project, leading to a contagion effect in which one shooting can influence the next.

Mass shootings are defined by the Congressional Research Service as having four or more victims.

Shootings at retail establishments have taken place in every decade since the 1960s, but have increased in recent years.

More than half of the retail shootings between 1966 - February 2020 have occurred in the past 14 years, with venues, including a mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, a car wash in Saltlick Township, Pennsylvania, and a gas station in Detroit, Michigan.

The deadliest attack took place in 2019 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, near the border with Mexico. The shooter allegedly told police he was targeting Hispanics. Three Mexicans were among the 22 people killed in that attack. The shooter was charged with federal hate crimes.

Another prominent shooting took place outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. The perpetrator targeted a constituent meeting held in a supermarket parking lot attended by U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who suffered a major brain injury. Six people died, and 13 others were injured.

Jillian Peterson, Ph.D., and James Densley, Ph.D., built a new database of mass shooters that they hope will inform future research and policy decisions about how to effectively prevent and respond to mass shootings.

For their study, they used the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass shooting:

“a multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms — not including the offender(s) — within one event, and at least some of the murders occurred in a public location or locations in close geographical proximity (e.g., a workplace, school, restaurant, or other public settings), and the murders are not attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).”

The team collected more than 100 pieces of information on each of 172 mass shooters, resulting in The Violence Project Database of Mass Shootings in the United States, 1966 - February 2020.

They compiled details on hundreds of factors, including age, race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, education, relationship status, number of children, employment type and status, military service and branch, criminal, violence and abuse history, gang and terrorist affiliation, bullying, home environment and trauma.

What emerged were fleshed-out profiles and motivations of individual shooters, whose crimes can potentially influence current and future policy and prevention.