At least four people were killed and eight others injured in a mass shooting on Sunday in Grand Blanc Township, when a 40-year-old man crashed a truck into a church chapel and fired at the congregation with an assault rifle. The incident was one of a dozen mass shootings in Michigan this year and the deadliest among six mass shootings reported in the U.S. last weekend.
The number of mass shootings peaked in Michigan and across the country in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Sept. 28, there have been 324 mass shootings this year in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive.
There’s no single consensus on the definition of a mass shooting. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a nonprofit research group, defines a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people are injured or killed by gunfire, not including the suspect. The suspect in Grand Blanc died in a confrontation with police.
Three mass shootings occurred on Sunday, September 28 — at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan; in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Eagle Pass, Texas. One person was killed and three were injured in the 100 block of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. And at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, two people were killed and six were injured.
In Southport, North Carolina, on Sept. 27, at least eight people were injured and three killed at a riverside restaurant near the Atlantic Ocean. The same day, four people were injured in a mass shooting in Alexandria, Louisiana, and four people were injured from gunfire in a mass shooting in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to GVA data.
The largest mass shooting in Michigan‘s recent history happened last year on Detroit’s eastside. Two people were killed and nineteen were injured on July 7, 2024.
The state’s second-largest mass shooting in recent years took place on June 24, 2023, at a street party in Saginaw, where 13 people were shot, two fatally, according to reports from the Gun Violence Archive, which goes back to 2013.
Kristi Tanner is a data reporter. Contact her at ktanner@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Grand Blanc Twp. mass shooting among a dozen in Michigan this year