Two 911 calls brought police in Texas and Washington to separate mass shootings in less than 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon, according to the Washington Post.
A 21-year-old man in Dallas who was supposed to be wearing an ankle monitor due to a prior aggravated assault charge walked into a residence and shot five people, killing a toddler and three adults. He fled in a stolen car, according to authorities, but shot himself as highway patrol officers chased him. Meanwhile in a suburb of Vancouver, Washington, five family members were killed in what sheriff’s deputies believe was a murder-suicide.
The shootings were the 37th and 38th instances this year in which four or more victims were killed, the highest number of mass killings in any year since at least 2006. The previous highest was 36 last year, according to the Washington Post’s analysis of mass killing data collected by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
The Post calls a shooting in which four people are killed excluding the shooter a “mass killing with a gun,” because the term “mass shooting” has no universal definition. Other organizations, such as Gun Violence Archive (GVA), define mass shootings more broadly and hence report much larger numbers, such as situations in which multiple people have been shot, regardless of whether anyone died. Last year, the GVA recorded over 600 mass shootings.
The Post cited Thomas Abt, associate research professor at the University of Maryland and founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, as saying that the record is “a tragic, shameful milestone that should – but probably will not – serve as a wake-up call” to lawmakers who oppose gun regulations.
