Skip to content
Apply
Stories

Maine shootings are 10th mass killing in a public setting this year, a US record, according to Northeastern expert

People in this story

Law enforcement gather outside Schemengee's Bar and Grille, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023, in Lewiston, Maine.

The shootings in Maine that have killed at least 18 people are a sign of the lethality of the weapons that are easily available, says James Alan Fox, a Northeastern professor who has been studying mass killings and serial murders for more than 40 years. The victims were killed in Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday night at a bowling alley and a bar several miles apart. Images from the bowling alley show a man carrying a high-powered, assault-style rifle. 

Fox says the Lewiston case is the 10th mass killing in a public setting this year, which he cites as a U.S. record. There have been 568 mass killings in the U.S. since 2006 that have claimed 2,962 lives, according to the Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings Database, the longest-running and most extensive data source on the subject, which is maintained by Fox.

A mass killing is defined as an event that results in four or more deaths. “Let’s understand that these events still are rare in a population of more than 330 million people,” says Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern. “What has changed is the severity of these crimes.”

Continue reading at Northeastern Global News.

More Stories

Denise Garcia’s, book, The AI Military Race, on Nov. 30, 2023.

Military AI: New book anticipates a world of “killer robots”—and the need to regulate them

12.04.2023
Northeastern postdoctoral teaching associate in english Catherine Fairfield poses for a portrait on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023.

A Swiftie’s “Wildest Dreams” come true: Northeastern is offering a course on Taylor Swift

11.30.2023
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor hold up a copy of the U.S. constitution that she carries with her Saturday, Sept. 17, 2005 at an open-air Immigration and Naturalization citizenship hearing in Gilbert, Ariz.

Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, remembered as “independent thinker” who often disappointed conservatives

12.04.23
Northeastern Global News