> From the beginning of 2022 to mid-June there were 254 mass murders in the U.S., and 611 last year: more than ever before (according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass murder as a case where at least 4 people, not including the perpetrator, were killed or wounded). Like all statistics, these numbers can be misleading, for they include the entire spectrum of gun deaths: shootings among all sorts of gangs, drug dealers, street shootings in black neighborhoods, family scandals, etc. However, far more concerning are the senseless shootings of completely innocent people in public places - shopping malls, schools, churches, and synagogues. > In this essay I will not discuss the broadly proposed solutions to this problem. What I will try to discuss here is not the solution, but some of the causes of the epidemic of shooting random people in public places that is sweeping the country. > The first question is: Who is shooting? The racial composition of criminals is as follows: about half of the shooters are white (52.3%), black (20.9%), Asian (6.4%), Hispanic (8.1%), and others. As we can see, there are far more black shooters than the proportion of blacks in the population (12.2%).