Entertainment television repeatedly distorts the reality of mass public shootings—both who commits them and how they occur. Show after show depicts shooters wielding machine guns, even though that never happens. Another falsehood it pushes is the idea that white supremacists frequently carry out such attacks.
Outlets such as the Anti-Defamation League keep claiming that violence is being committed by people on the right. “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings,” they put out in their most recent report. But what is clear is that the vast majority of mass public shootings are committed by those with no political beliefs. We have previously done a deep dive into the ADL numbers on murders by extremists where we showed how they misclassified these murderers. Of course, politicians such as Joe Biden and media outlets have continually pushed this false narrative.
Our dataset of Mass Public Shooting List US 1998-August 2025 details the ages, political views, religious beliefs, race, and gender of mass public shooters. We define a mass public shooting as an attack in which four or more people are killed at one time in a public place, excluding crimes such as gang fights or robberies. We also examined mass vehicle and bombing attacks, though fatal bombing incidents in the U.S. remain rare. The data clearly show that very few of these attacks stem from political or religious motivations.
The claim that mass public shooters are overwhelmingly white misleads the public. Whites (excluding those of Middle Eastern descent) do make up the largest share of shooters, but their representation falls 9.3% below their share of the U.S. population. Hispanics also account for fewer shooters than their population share. In contrast, individuals of Middle Eastern descent, Asians, Blacks, and American Indians all appear at rates above their shares of the population. If you combine all Christian groups together, you get 14.9% being Christian so that exceeds the number of Muslims, though Muslims and other non-Christian religions are overrepresented relative to their share of the population and Christians and Jews are underrepresented.
These killers are also overwhelmingly non-political (77%). This has increased from 73% in our earlier analysis that looked at the period from 1998 to 2021, so the more recent cases over the last four years have tended to be even more non-political. The next most prominent group are Islamic extremists (6%), but you won’t see any of the television shows having Islamic extremists making these attacks. Few of these involve hate crimes against blacks: Dylann Storm Roof (Charleston, SC 6/17/2015); Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh, PA 10/27/2018); Patrick Wood Crusius (El Paso, TX 8/3/2019). On the other hand, the Dallas, Texas attack by Micah Xavier Johnson on July 7, 2016 involved an attack that specifically targeted white police officers.
However, mass public shooters are overwhelmingly male, with 96% of shooters being male.
The ADL extremist murder reports for 2022, 2023, and 2024 are available here. An Excel file with the data organized is available here.
