Mass killings are rising as the punishment for committing mass murder has effectively gone down. Fewer murderers are being caught, partly due to shrinking police manpower. NPR reports that unsolved killings are at a record high. Prosecution rates for violent crimes have gone down. Penalties are going down for the worst killings, such as mass murder and serial killings. Almost no one gets executed for mass killings these days, and many don’t spend life in prison even if they are caught. The Supreme Court has made it very difficult to impose the death penalty, such as banning it for homicidal teens. It has also banned mandatory life without parole for teens, even if they commit serial killings or mass murder. State supreme courts in places like Washington have overturned mandatory life without parole even for some classes of adult serial killers. Even for adults, it is difficult to obtain a death sentence for a serial killer thanks to court rulings. As a result, criminals have been emboldened to commit mass murder.
The United States set a record of 28 mass killings in the first half of 2023. 140 people were killed in those mass shootings. All but one of the mass killings – incidents in which four or more people are slain not including the perpetrator – was with a gun. (Countries with fewer guns have mass killings using knives, such as the recent mass stabbing in China, where a man killed six kindergartners using a knife).
“What a ghastly milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville in March when a former student fatally shot six people. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”
The 2023 milestone beat the previous record of 27 mass killings, which was only set in the second half of 2022. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago. “We used to say there were two to three dozen a year. The fact that there’s 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic.”
Not all mass shootings result in fatalities, due to improving medical care and some shooters having bad aim. The U.S. has experienced 377 mass shootings since the start of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archives database.
Around the Independence Day holiday, multiple mass shootings killed and injured dozens of people across the country, including in Washington, DC. Despite all the deaths from mass killings, they are statistically rare and represent only a fraction of all killings in America.
It is easier to get away with murder these days, due to declining police manpower. Police manpower was shrinking even before 2020, notes Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, even though a “robust body of research has thoroughly illustrated that more police means less crime….There is also reason to believe that — in part because of the anti-police sentiments that characterized [2020’s] protests — the cops we have left became less proactive.”
Another factor in rising violence is falling incarceration rates, which result in violent offenders being released from jail or not being jailed in the first place. The number of people in America’s prisons and jails dropped by 14% from 2019 to mid-2020.
Many murderers are spending less time in prison, due to recent “criminal justice reforms” — even though short sentences are less effective at deterring crime than longer sentences. In 2020, Washington, D.C.’s city government made even mass murderers eligible to seek release after 15 years, if they committed their crime before age 25 (which is true of many murderers). Dozens of murderers were quickly released, some of whom had killed multiple people. Some left-wing district attorneys have recently refused to prosecute any minors — even murderers — in adult court. So serial killers who commit their crimes at age 17 will not be locked up for more than a few years. Juvenile killers often commit more violent crimes after being released.
Very few serial killers are executed these days, even though executions can save lives by deterring people from committing murder. Several studies found that the death penalty deters killings of innocent people. As the Associated Press noted in 2007, “Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five, and 14).”
