If you feel like America is seeing an unusual amount of shootings in open crowds in the past few years, you are right.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation found the number of incidents in which a shooter opens fire on a crowd has doubled from 2006, according to a recent report.
The FBI looked at 160 active shooter cases from 2000-2013. They found that in the first six years (2000-2006) there were six open crowd shooting cases a year. In the last seven years, the annual number of open shootings in the country rose to 16.
"Unlike mass shooting data, which come from routinely collected police reports, there is no official data source for active shooter events," Fox says. "It's not clear whether the increase in active shooter events is completely related to the actual case count or to the availability and accessibility of news reports to identify such events."
The investigation also found that two-thirds of the cases happened in schools and businesses. The majority of the shooters were male.
The FBI hopes to be able to use these findings to be able to get better at "preventing the shootings or responding more effectively," they tell USA Today.
