Between August 1982 and March 2026, Mother Jones tracked 159 mass shootings in the United States.
The database, accessed via Statista and released in March 2026, categorizes each incident by the shooter’s race or ethnicity across a 44-year period.
Before any number in that dataset is read, one thing must be stated clearly:
Mother Jones defines a mass shooting as an attack resulting in four or more fatalities in a public place, carried out as an indiscriminate attack. Gang violence and domestic violence confined to a residence are specifically excluded.
That definition determines everything that follows.
TL;DR
- White Americans represent approximately 59% of the U.S. population. Their share of mass shooting perpetrators (54.7%) is modestly below their population share.
The Raw Numbers
| wdt_ID | wdt_created_by | wdt_created_at | wdt_last_edited_by | wdt_last_edited_at | Characteristic | Number of incidents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | White | 87 |
| 2 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Black | 27 |
| 3 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Latino | 12 |
| 4 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Asian | 10 |
| 5 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Other | 5 |
| 6 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Native American | 3 |
| 7 | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | emmanuel-ashemiriogwa | 25/04/2026 08:37 PM | Unknown/unclear | 15 |
White Americans account for 54.7% of the 144 incidents with an identified perpetrator race.
They are the largest group in absolute terms by a significant margin, more than three times the next largest category.
On those raw numbers alone, mass shootings in America look like a predominantly white phenomenon.
But raw numbers without population context are not the full picture. They are the beginning of it.
What the Population Context Changes
White Americans represent approximately 59% of the U.S. population.
Their share of mass shooting perpetrators in this dataset (54.7%) is modestly below their population share.
Measured this way, white Americans are slightly underrepresented as mass shooters relative to how many white Americans there are.
That finding runs directly against the dominant public perception.
Black Americans represent approximately 13.6% of the U.S. population and account for 16.98% of identified perpetrators in the dataset.
That’s a modest overrepresentation.
However, the Mother Jones definition excludes gang violence, which disproportionately affects Black communities both as perpetrators and as victims.
The dataset is measuring a specific slice of mass violence, which is high-casualty public space attacks.
It doesn’t measure the full spectrum of gun violence that affects Black Americans at much higher rates.
About the Latino Americans…
The most striking population-adjusted finding belongs to Latino Americans.
They account for 12 incidents, 7.5% of the identified total, while representing approximately 19% of the U.S. population.
Latino Americans are the most underrepresented group in this dataset relative to their population share by a wide margin.
That gap is larger than the gap for any other group.
It is also among the least discussed findings in public conversations about mass shootings and immigration, despite its direct relevance to political claims linking Latino immigration to violent crime.
The 15 Unknowns
Fifteen incidents (9.4% of the total dataset) carry an unknown or unclear racial designation.
These are cases where the shooter was not apprehended, died at the scene without documentation, or where historical records were incomplete.
Every population-adjusted calculation in this dataset is affected by those 15 cases.
Their racial distribution, if ever determinable, could shift every percentage cited above.
What the Definition Hides
The Mother Jones methodology is rigorous within its scope.
That scope has consequences.
The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks all incidents involving four or more people shot, regardless of location or gang involvement, produces dramatically higher total counts and a different racial distribution.
The dataset also makes no distinction between a racially motivated attack and one with a different motive.
For example, the 2022 Buffalo shooting (in which a white gunman specifically targeted Black shoppers, killing 10) and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings (in which an Asian perpetrator targeted Asian women, killing 8) both appear in their respective racial perpetrator categories without the targeting dimension being visible in the data.
Perpetrator race and victim targeting are two different analytical dimensions that the dataset does not separate.
ELI5
A count of American mass shootings over 44 years shows that white people committed the most attacks in total, but when you consider how many white, Black, Latino, and Asian people actually live in America, the numbers look different.
Latino Americans, nearly one in five Americans, were involved in the fewest attacks relative to their population size. The data also only counts certain types of shootings, so it misses a lot of gun violence that affects Black communities most. The numbers are real, but reading them without context gives the wrong picture.
Source:
Mother Jones, U.S. Mass Shootings Database | U.S. Census Bureau