The Texas church shooting will be the fifth-worst in recent history – and three of the deadliest shootings of the past 35 years have occurred in the past 18 months

Not your imagination: mass shootings now happen more frequently in the US

Twenty-six people were killed when a gunman opened fire in a church in Texas on Sunday. The violence is consistent with a trend in recent US history – mass shootings have become more frequent and more deadly.

If the number of fatalities remains at 26, Sunday’s shooting will be the fifth-worst mass shooting in recent history. Three of the deadliest shootings of the past 35 years have occurred in the past 18 months.

These numbers come from Mother Jones, a not-for-profit news organization that maintains a database of all shootings in the US since 1982 that are “indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in three or more victims killed by the attacker”.

The threshold used to be four killings but it was lowered to three in January 2013 by Barack Obama – a full description of all the criteria for inclusion in the database can be found here.

The Mother Jones database shows that, on average, there are now fewer days between mass shootings and more fatalities. In the 1990s, an estimated 159 people were killed in mass shootings. That figure rose to 171 people in the 2000s. So far this decade, at least 381 people have been killed in mass shootings.

The Mother Jones spreadsheet also shows how less deadly mass shootings rarely receive the same degree of media attention because they simply happen so frequently. The last mass shooting prior to Sunday happened just four days earlier, when Scott Allen Ostrem, 47, walked into a Walmart in Denver and fatally shot two men and a woman, before leaving the store and driving away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How guns kill people. Photograph: Mona Chalabi

It is worth considering the broader context of gun violence in the US. Large-scale mass shootings make up a small fraction of that violence. Of the approximately 33,000 gun violence deaths each year, only about 1.5% come from mass shootings. Two-thirds of gun violence deaths are from suicide. This chart does not show the people who are injured by guns each year in the US – more than 70,000 of them.