GOP baseball shooting is the 154th mass shooting this year

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, center, and other members of the Republican Congressional softball team, stand behind police tape of the scene of a multiple shooting in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, June 14, 2017, where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of La. was shot. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

The shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, is the 154th mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks information on shootings in the United States. 165 days through the calendar year, that averages out a little less than one mass shooting per day.

The shooting at the congressional baseball practice is in fact the sixth such incident this week. Tuesday, eight people were shot in two separate incidents in the city of Baltimore alone. On Sunday, nine people were shot during an incident in Chicago, four were shot at a lounge in Tennessee, and four teenagers were shot at an apartment complex in Houston.

The Archive considers an incident a mass shooting if four or more people are shot, not including the shooter. Some definitions are broader: if you include the shooter in the tally, the number of mass shootings rises to 195. Others are much more narrow: if you define a mass shooting as four or more victims killed in a public location, excluding robberies and gang violence, the number falls to just four.

Using the Gun Violence Archive's definition, the number of mass shootings has been ticking upward in recent years: through June 14, there were 100 mass shootings in 2014, 135 in 2015, 142 last year, and 154 this year.

This could be a function of the general uptick in violence that's been observed in some cities in recent years. It could also be partly due to better reporting following increased public interest in mass shootings after a spate of the incidents in 2015.