A gunman opened fire at a popular Walmart in El Paso, Texas on Saturday morning, killing 22 and injuring 26. The shooting is the third deadliest in Texas history, behind the Sutherland Springs shooting in 2017 and the 1991 Luby’s shooting in Killeen, Texas.
The shooting left El Pasoans devastated in a city that has consistently ranked among the safest in the United States.
Hours after the El Paso shooting ended, a gunman killed nine and injured at least 27 in Dayton, Ohio.
The El Paso and Dayton mass shootings join the series of killings that have happened in the United States this year. On July 29, three were killed and 12 wounded at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Gun Violence Archive – which defines mass shootings as an incident where at least four people are injured, excluding the shooter – reports there have been 255 mass shootings in 2019 alone.
Texas and the San Antonio area has seen its fair share of gun violence. In 2017, a gunman shot and killed 26 people and injured 20 others in Sutherland Springs before being shot by a bystander, crashing his car, and ultimately dying of a self-inflicted gunshot. And in 2018, 10 people were killed and 10 injured in a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.
The second-deadliest shooting in Texas took place in Killeen in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard drove his pickup truck through the front window of a Luby’s restaurant. He shot and killed 23 people and wounded 27 others. After refusing to surrender, Hennard engaged in a brief shootout with police and then fatally shot himself.
In 1979, Ira Attebury opened fire from inside his recreational vehicle during the Battle of Flowers Parade near downtown San Antonio, killing two and injuring 51. In 1966, University of Texas at Austin student Charles Whitman ascended the university’s iconic bell tower and opened fire on the campus below. Seventeen people, including Whitman, lost their lives on Aug. 1, 1966; an 18th victim died in 2001 from related injuries and 31 were injured in the massacre.
Patrick Crusius, 21, of Allen, Texas, a suburb north of Dallas, drove more than 650 miles to El Paso to carry out what police have determined a racially motivated attack, which he outlined in his manifesto.
On Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott said the El Paso shooting was a “heinous and senseless act of violence,” and called it a hate crime.
“Our hearts go out to the victims of this horrific shooting and to the entire community in this time of loss,” Abbott said in a statement. “While no words can provide the solace needed for those impacted by this event, I ask that all Texans join Cecilia and me in offering our prayers for the victims and their families.
“The state of Texas will do everything it can to ensure justice is delivered to the perpetrators of this heinous act.”
Click on the map below for details.
I understand that this was created in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, but I would be very curious to see a map of ALL the gun incidents in Texas since 1966. Perhaps they could be broken out into specific categories like accidental discharges, suicides, intimate partner violence, violent crime, police involved shootings. Unfortunately, I’m sure there are more categories that I am not thinking of.
It’s easy to focus on large-scale events because they are headline generators, but the majority of gun deaths come in other forms besides those depicted in this infographic.
Good point Andy. I think it would be very interesting to see that info.
This is an interesting graphic, but it is only skimming the surface and doesn’t go into underlying currents–not that that was original intent, of course. If you look at the last 100 years of the nation’s history, the central stretch of land from central Texas up to and including central and eastern Oklahoma have been the scene of our greatest violent acts, shocking in their scope..and yes, they are all connected: UT Tower sniper killings, Waco Twin Peaks shoot-out, Waco Branch Davidian siege, the Killeen Luby’s massacre , Fort Hood massacre (2 of them!) Waco public lynching (greatest turn out of a lynching in US history), Oklahoma City bombing, Tulsa and Oklahoma race riots of the 1910s, JFK assassination, the Ossage Indian state-wide massacre in Oklahoma from 1921-1924. I can go on. Tying all them together is the heady mix of political extremism of the far right, and their use of fundamentalist religion to solidify the Anglo hold on land and property and the economy at the expense of poor whites, blacks, browns, and the native Indians of Oklahoma and Texas. Oswald, although a leftist, was surely influenced by the astonishing vilification of JFK by the political-religious extreme right wing in Dallas. The easy availability of armaments, combined with a perverted sense of “individualism and self reliance” , and fundamentalist Protestantism, is and was a heady mix. And the southern economic elite’s extreme anti-Washington stance, designed to split the black and white populace (adopted by the poor and working class whites of the South as “states rights” and now “white nationalism” ) also added to the toxic stew. But don’t take my word for it, there a plenty of historians right here in Texas who have written the books on this (thankfully , my decades of research on this won’t require me finish my book on this, as they –and William T. Volmann– did the job for me!). You can start with these: Bradley T Turner “Lust Violence and Religion” and William D. Carrigan “The Making of a Lynching Culture:violence and vigilantism in central Texas” . Not pleasant reading, but if we are to understand the current political climate in Texas and the region, we need to look deep, however painful.
Looks like it’s time to update the mass shootings in Texas map. That is such a terribly depressing thing to have to write. When will it finally be enough? How many more people have to die at the hands of a deranged person with a gun before we as a state and nation decide it it too much?
I don’t know what the solutions are, but this is completely unacceptable. Texas leaders, DO SOMETHING.
Andy, thank you for your feedback. We’ve updated the map to reflect yesterday’s tragic events.