The website Gun Violence Archive uses a combination of computer programs and human analysts to go through local news stories and tie one story to one incident and classify each.
The database goes back to 2014. In that time there have been 5,317 reported gun incidents in Arizona which have resulted in 2,644 reported injuries and 2,648 reported deaths.
Annually from 2014 to 2019, gun violence reports ranged between 480 and 621. A 35% increase occurred between 2019 and 2020 to a high of 841. Last year, reports fell to 791, still higher than each of the first five years in the dataset.
In the first half of this year, there have been 343 gun violence reports, down 30% compared to the first half of last year. The first half of 2022 has been the deadliest of the years recorded in the database. There have been 231 deaths in the first half of the year compared to 218 last year.
One of the most prevalent categories of gun violence is domestic violence and murder-suicides, which account for 634 gun violence reports. These are very deadly, with a three-to-one ratio of people killed to people injured.
In fact, the four deadliest reported shootings in Arizona since 2014, where more than five people were killed, including the shooter, were all classified by the gun violence archive as murder-suicides.
There have been six reports of school shootings in Arizona since 2014 that resulted in an injury or death. The most recent occurred on March 23 of this year.
