Collection

The mass shootings that changed the debate

Public attacks whose place-names became a national shorthand — and the argument over guns, security, and prevention that followed each one.

spanning the 1990s to the 2020s

A mass shooting is remembered, more often than not, by a place. Sandy Hook. Parkland. Pulse. Las Vegas. The name of a school, a nightclub, a festival comes to stand for the people killed there — and for an argument the country has again each time, and rarely settles.

The files here are among the most-documented in the archive: twenty first-graders and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown; forty-nine people at a nightclub in Orlando during its Latin Night; fifty-one worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch. A few reshaped the law — Christchurch led New Zealand to ban military-style semi-automatic weapons within a month, and the students who survived Parkland built a national movement. Others changed almost nothing but the vocabulary of grief.

This collection is heavy by design. It keeps its subject on the people the attacks were aimed at, not the people who carried them out — a perpetrator is named only where a court has convicted them. What the files record is the loss, and what a society did, or failed to do, once the shooting stopped.