The Gilroy Shooting Shows No Place in America Is Safe From Gun Violence

Over the weekend, two beloved summertime festivals on opposite coasts became the latest sites of mass shootings in America. On Saturday, two men opened fire during the 56th annual Old Timers Day in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, killing one and wounding 11 more. The next day, a teenager wielding a rifle began shooting at the 41st annual Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. Three attendees, including a 13-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy, were killed, and at least 12 more were injured. The gunman died in a shootout with police.

Firearms kill around 37,000 people in the United States each year, a number that puts the U.S. after only Brazil, among world leaders in firearms deaths, according to a 2018 study. While block parties, tragically, have been the site for gun violence before, the Gilroy shooting may very well be the first time a mass shooting took place at one of the country's biggest food festivals. It certainly was inevitable, with movie theaters, school classrooms, and office buildings already caught up in this country's gun-violence epidemic. Below are a number of other places in American life once assumed safe from becoming the site of another one of these tragedies. This list is derived from data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive. In all likelihood, there will be more to add to it soon.

Baby showers

Gunfire at a baby shower in Chicago left six people wounded this past April.

Schools

In April 1999, a pair of seniors at Columbine High School in Aurora, Colorado, killed 13 classmates and wounded 24 more. At the time, it was the deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history; in the two decades since, its death toll has been eclipsed twice. In 2018, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida returned to campus with a semiautomatic rifle and killed 17 people, injuring 17 more. In 2012, a 20-year-old man shot and killed his mother before attacking Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In five minutes, he killed 20 children—all age 7 or younger—and six staff members, wounding two.

Movie theaters

In Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012, 12 filmgoers died and 70 were injured when a gunman opened fire during a showing of The Dark Knight. Some witnesses who saw the shooter beforehand believed he was playing a prank—a PR stunt put on by the studio, maybe—until they saw him throw a canister of tear gas into the audience. Since then, there has been at least one other mass shooting at a movie theater: At a July 2015 screening of Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana, a man killed two and injured nine.

Housewarming parties

Earlier this month, a man shot his sister at a housewarming party in Fort Bend, Texas, wounding three others. He then killed himself.

Offices

In June, a Virginia Beach city employee killed 12 colleagues and injured four more at the municipal building where he'd worked for 15 years. In June 2018, a gunman killed five and injured two after storming the newsroom of the Capital Gazette, a paper against which he held a grudge, in Annapolis, Maryland. Nearly four years ago in San Bernardino, California, a husband-and-wife duo professing allegiance to ISIS killed 14 and injured 22 during the holiday party thrown by the county health department where the husband worked.

Retirement homes

In March of last year, a man killed four people at a residential treatment program for veterans in Yountville, California. He then turned the gun on himself.

Nightclubs

Last fall, during a country-Western-themed night at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousands Oaks, California, a gunman killed 12 people, including seven college students, and injured 18. In June 2016, a shooter attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and injuring 53. It would remain the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history for less than two years.

Yoga studios

In November 2018, a man walked into a Tallahassee, Florida, hot-yoga studio and opened fire, killing two and injuring five.

Grocery stores

In July 2017, as employees at a Weis Markets supermarket in Eaton Township, Pennsylvania, were preparing to close it to customers, an employee arriving for the overnight shift barricaded the exits and began firing at co-workers inside. He killed three before shooting himself. At a congressional meet-and-greet outside a Tucson, Arizona, Safeway in 2011, a gunman killed six and wounded 13, including Representative Gabby Giffords, who resigned her seat in Congress in order to focus on her recovery.

Hospitals

Last fall, a man killed his fiancée, a doctor at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, along with a police officer and pharmaceutical assistant on the scene, in a domestic dispute. The shooter then killed himself.

Bowling alleys

Last January, three people died and four more were injured in a shooting at a Torrance, California, bowling alley and karaoke bar.

College campuses

What is still America's deadliest school shooting took place in April 2007, when a graduating senior at Virginia Tech killed 32 and injured 17 in a campus dormitory and, after that, a lecture hall. In late 2015, a 26-year-old student at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killed nine and injured eight, leaving behind a manifesto referencing, among other well-known incidents of gun violence, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. Just this past May, a former student at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte killed four and injured two while students in a "Science, Technology, & Society" class were delivering their end-of-semester presentations. He told investigators he had "researched" the Sandy Hook massacre at length.

Churches

In September 2017, a gunman interrupted regular Sunday service at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, to kill 26 churchgoers and injure 20 more. (A former Air Force enlistee, the gunman had a prior domestic-violence court martial that should have prevented him from purchasing firearms, but the military admitted it had erroneously failed to submit his information to the National Crime Information Center's database.) In September 2017, a gunman killed one worshipper and injured seven at Burnette Chapel in Antioch, Tennessee. A year earlier, a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, attacked Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the country's oldest black churches, killing nine and wounding one.

Synagogues

Last fall, an avowed anti-Semite and alt-right sympathizer killed 11 and injured six during morning services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Six months later, a Nazi sympathizer inspired by that act of terror attacked a synagogue across the country in Poway, California, killing one and injuring three.

Sikh temples

Seven years ago, a 40-year-old man with dreams of starting a "racial holy war" stormed a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring four. He died by suicide before police could apprehend him.

Restaurants

In April 2018, a gunman killed four and injured four at a Waffle House in Nashville. Last fall, a contestant in a Madden tournament opened fire on his fellow competitors inside a Jacksonville, Florida, pizza restaurant, killing two and wounding 11. Some witnesses speculated that the shooter was upset about a video game he lost earlier that day, but his motive remains unknown. He died by suicide before police could arrest him.

Concerts

In October 2017, a 64-year-old man fired more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition into the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 and injuring more than 500. Police found 23 firearms in the 32nd-floor hotel room from which he had opened fire, and another 24 at his home. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

Originally Appeared on GQ