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A gunman who killed eight children—seven of them his own—and shot two women at two homes in Shreveport, Louisiana, before dying after a police pursuit was involved in what authorities called "entirely a domestic incident." Relatives told The Associated Press that Shamar Elkins and his partner had been separating and were due in court Monday.
That combination—a family massacre inside a breakup, with children and a court date in the middle of it—should reset the national conversation about a type of shooting that has become bleakly synonymous with the U.S.
Instead, it will likely get absorbed into the usual American script about "mass shootings," one that points the public mind toward the random public terror of a school lunch hall or a packed movie theater when the truth often lies much closer to home.
Read More on Analysis
Many of the deadliest attacks begin inside collapsing families.
Mass Shootings as Public Randomness
The first problem is conceptual.
As the think tank RAND notes, the U.S. has no single standard definition of a "mass shooting," and counts vary depending on whether and how a database uses fatalities, injuries, location, or motive.
But the public imagination is narrower than any database: it is built around the kind of event the FBI describes as an active shooter in a populated area.
The image is real and terrifyingly familiar, footage played out on repeat across mass media and social platforms. Its victims are real too, each representing an individual tragedy that ripples out across the lives of those they leave behind. But this is not the whole story.
The AP/USA Today/Northeastern mass-killings project says national media coverage tends to focus on public mass killings and indiscriminate violence.
But Northeastern says mass shootings, though they draw the most media attention, are "only a small part of a larger problem in America."
When a country imagines mass violence mainly as a public ambush by a stranger, it risks looking for danger in the wrong places, too often missing the violence gathering force behind the family’s front door.
What the Data Says About Mass Killings
The mismatch between the national story and the long-run data is substantial.
In the AP/USA Today/Northeastern database, around 67 percent of mass killings occur in and around residences, and mass killings involving family members made up 48 percent of all cases since 2006.
The same database warns that mass killings and mass shootings are sometimes conflated, even though using the terms interchangeably can distort how often these events seem to happen.
Shreveport, therefore, is not some shocking anomaly or a rule-proving exception. It is an especially devastating example of a pattern Americans tend to perceive as secondary.
Family-based massacres often receive less durable attention because they do not fit the country’s preferred narrative of public innocence interrupted by an alien menace.
They look too familiar, too private, too entangled with marriage, custody, resentment, and control. Too easily explained and filed away by the public consciousness.
But private does not mean atypical. In this corner of American violence, private is often exactly where the danger is.
The Most Neglected Danger Point
The second blind spot is temporal. Louisiana’s 2024 Domestic Abuse Fatality Review report says services tied to protective orders, child-custody orders, and separation and divorce proceedings are "essential" to victim safety.
The same report says that when children are involved and domestic violence has occurred, risks to both the adult victim and the children compound, and that supervised visitation and exchange centers can help families through a "volatile period of separation."
Louisiana’s statewide data also show that 75 percent of domestic-abuse homicides from 2020 to 2022 were committed by firearm.
At the national level, the National Institute of Justice summarizes federally supported research finding that lethal intimate-partner risk factors include post-separation control tactics and the presence of a child from a previous relationship.
None of that proves what investigators have not yet determined to be true in Shreveport. But it does show why separation is not just emotional background noise.
In abusive relationships, it is often the phase when access, grievance, and leverage collide in the most catastrophic end.
The urgent question for policymakers, one with life-saving potential in the future: how can we prevent these situations from happening?
Misplacing Prevention
Louisiana maintains a statewide Protective Order Registry, and state law requires judges to order firearm transfers to law enforcement after certain domestic-violence convictions or qualifying protective orders.
Yet Louisiana’s own fatality-review panel has urged courts to work with LPOR on uniform firearm-transfer processes and on active follow-up to ensure guns are removed from the home.
The uncomfortable inference is that if a high-risk relationship never generates a protective order, a qualifying conviction, or another formal trigger, the state’s best back-end tools may never turn on.
Officials knew of a 2019 firearms case involving Shamar Elkins—including the illegal use of a weapon—but said they were not aware of any other domestic-violence issues. Relatives described him as having mental health issues and suicidal thoughts.
There is much we still don’t know about this particular case. But it will beg vital questions. It must be fully unpacked and understood so that missed opportunities for interventions are identified, and any mistakes are not repeated.
The generic language of "mass shootings" invites performative responses to a grim spectacle while obscuring whether police, courts, and family-law systems are actually recognizing the recurring danger points of domestic rupture.
Honest Conversation
A more honest American vocabulary doesn’t need to minimize school shootings or other public massacres. It would just stop pretending they are the template for all mass violence.
Shreveport is horrifying because it looks so intimate. Children, homes, a separation, a court date. The intimacy is the lesson here.
The long-running mass-killings data say many of these events happen at home and involve family. Louisiana’s own fatality-review framework says separation, custody exchange, protective orders, and firearm removal are recurring pressure points.
Until the country treats those facts as central rather than incidental, it will keep misdescribing the problem.
And, in the most dangerous moments, missing any last chances to interrupt it.
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