mass shooting

[ mas shoot-ing ]

noun

1. a single incident involving the shooting with one or more firearms of a number of people, but more than two and typically a large number, especially when the victims are random:

   There's news of a mass shooting at the stadium, with two fatalities and 25 injured.

Word History and Origins

Origin of mass shooting¹

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

Representatives from The Onion told the New York Times that its bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, who successfully sued Jones for $1.4 billion in a defamation lawsuit.

From Salon

In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.

From BBC

Filion was arrested in January in California on Florida state charges arising from a May 2023 threat he made to carry out a mass shooting at Masjid Al Hayy, a mosque in Sanford, Fla.

From Los Angeles Times

One call was made in October 2022 to a public high school in Washington, in which he threatened to commit a mass shooting and claimed to have planted bombs throughout the school, authorities said.

From Los Angeles Times

Mr Shakeri also told prosecutors that his Iranian contacts asked him to plan a mass shooting event to target Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka in October 2024, a year after the Hamas attacks on Israel.

From BBC