Since Aurora, a steady stream of mass killings

In the year since the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., 23 mass killings in 19 states have taken the lives of 126 people. Six of the attacks were public killings in which many of the victims were unknown to their killers.

A USA TODAY database of these shootings over the past seven years shows that what Americans experienced over the past calendar year is sadly typical. There have been 14 such incidents since Jan. 1 of this year, while 2012 actually had a low for the reporting period: 22 mass killings. The high was 37 in 2006, the first year of the examination. (The FBI defines mass killings as murders that occur in a short time span and in which four or more people are killed.)

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The other 17 mass killings in the past year — most either family slayings or murders that occurred in the course of a robbery or drug transaction — occurred off the national radar. On an American Indian reservation in North Dakota in November, a man entered his neighbor's house a block away and shot dead a grandmother and three of her grandchildren, then drove 20 miles to his father's home and killed himself. A man in Schenectady, N.Y., could face the death penalty in an arson that trapped a father and his three young children on the upper floor of their home in early May.

Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/15/mass-killings-after-aurora/2512501/