Seventeen mass killings have occurred this year in the U.S., the lowest since 2006.

Moments after the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville private school was identified as transgender, a baseless narrative emerged that there has been an incredible rise in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in recent years.

Students processing the attack in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 students and two teachers — yet another school shooting — returned to a common theme: They are the “lockdown generation.”.

Homicides in the U.S. in 2020 increased nearly 30% over the previous year, the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records.

Experts who research mass killings say there are two key reasons for the sharp drop-off. It’s really the pandemic, which is a thing not a person.”Besides the two public mass shootings this year, the AP/USA Today/Northeastern database tracked 10 family mass slayings, eight of which were shootings. Three mass killings were carried out in the course of other crimes, and six attacks that happened for unknown reasons. The change in the number of public mass shootings is the most stark. While the drop-off in high-profile shootings is heartening, experts who track gun violence note that other shootings appear to have risen this year: gang violence, drive-by shootings and other random firearm deaths.