When police responded to reports of a gunman at the In-N-Out Burger restaurant in San Jose, California, on Thursday, they found the restaurant’s 35-year-old manager, who has been identified by authorities as One Goh, holding a handgun. Within minutes of his arrest, Goh had told the police “I hate my job. I hate this,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “I hate this place. I hate these people. I hate myself. I hate everything.”
It was the spring of 2014, and the San Jose, California police force was under a lot of stress from a string of recent violent crimes. In his spare time, Officer Chris Harris, 27, was taking advantage of the stress by writing a blog in which he vented about his workplace and the news of the day.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the shooter, released a report on the 26th. May had at least 232 mass shootings. (Archives, a nonprofit, counted 15 mass killings in 2021, which it defines as the murder of four or more people.)
There is no consensus on the definition of mass shootings, which complicates the efforts of nonprofit organizations and the media to assess the extent of the problem.
Project Violence adheres to the Congressional Research Service’s narrow definition that attacks must be public and exclude domestic shootings and attacks related to elementary criminal activity. CNN defined a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were injured or killed. The Washington Post’s attempt to capture mass shootings in public places includes shootings in which four or more people were killed, but not robberies or domestic shootings in private homes.
This year, that includes the Atlanta shooting. Indianapolis. Boulder, Colorado. Boone, North Carolina, and now San Jose.
To some, it may seem that mass shootings virtually stopped during the coronavirus pandemic: A year has passed between large-scale shootings in public places. But the shooting didn’t stop. They just weren’t that public.
The Gun Violence Archive counted more than 600 such shootings in 2020, up from 417 in 2019.
