Mass killings in the United States are on track to be at their lowest annual levels since 2006.
A recent mass shooting at a children’s birthday party in California marked the country’s 17th mass killing in 2025, but the incidents are down 24% this year, according to an Associated Press database.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino attributed the drop to “broken windows” policing and “innovative personnel management,” while mysteriously acknowledging that the past administration is holding them back.
“Anonymous sources from the [former Directors Christopher Wray and James Comey] era FBI are desperately trying to derail our reforms,” he wrote on X. “Using the principles of ‘broken windows’ policing, along with innovative personnel management, we’ve sent the murder rate to a historic low, and we’ve doubled the amount of violent crime arrests from prior years.”
“Results matter, not anonymous complaints from disgruntled actors who preferred the Wray-Comey, weaponized FBI. We’re not going back,” he added.
It’s unclear how the “anonymous sources from the Wray-Comey era FBI” are trying to influence the second Trump administration FBI. The Washington Examiner reached out to the FBI for comment, but did not receive a response.
FBI Director Kash Patel praised President Donald Trump’s leadership for the drop in mass killings.
“Leadership matters,” he wrote on X. “@realDonaldTrump empowering law enforcement all across the country to do their jobs and stop killings BEFORE they happen. Lives being saved every day because of it.”
James Alan Fox, a criminologist from Northeastern University, told the Associated Press that the drop in shootings is closer to what statisticians call a “regression to the mean.”
“Sir Isaac Newton never studied crime, but he says, ‘What goes up must come down,’” he said, adding that crime is returning to average levels after mass killings spiked in 2018 and 2019.
“Will 2026 see a decline?” Fox said. “I wouldn’t bet on it. What goes down must also go back up.”
The drop in mass killings can be partially explained by the improvement in the response to such incidents, such as a mass shooting in Minnesota that injured almost two dozen people but killed only two.
“We had the horrible Annunciation School shooting here in Minnesota back in August, and that case wouldn’t even fit the mass killing definition because there were only two people killed, but over 20 injured,” James Densley, a professor of criminology at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, told the outlet.
“But I happen to know from the response on the ground here that the reason only two people were killed is because of the bleeding control and trauma response by the first responders. And it happened on the doorsteps of some of the best children’s hospitals in the country,” he added.
The Trump administration said it would take action in August of this year to investigate the motivations of mass shooters. “There was no time in the past when people would walk into a church or a classroom and start shooting people,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News.
FOUR PEOPLE SHOT DURING CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION IN NORTH CAROLINA
“And it’s not really happening in other countries,” he added. “It’s happening here, and we need to look at all of the potential culprits that might be contributing to that.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the same day that the HHS would be looking into links between prescription drugs and violence.