ATTACKS ON HOUSES WORSHIPViolent Acts in Houses of Worship Are Rare but Deadly – Here’s What the Data Shows
Houses of worship are meant to be open spaces of peace and refuge. The challenge is balancing this higher purpose with practical security. By studying past tragedies, Americans may better prepare for the future –and prevent more families from enduring the heartbreak of recent weeks.
On Sept. 28, 2025, at least four people were killed and eight others injured during a Sunday service at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Just a month earlier, two people died and 21 were injured during a Mass for students at the Catholic Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis.
These tragedies may feel sudden and senseless, but they are part of a longer pattern that we have been tracking.
We are criminologists who have studied violence for decades. In 2023, we created a public database of homicides that occur in houses of worship across the United States. It now spans nearly 25 years of incidents, documenting how often these attacks happen, who perpetrates them, what weapons are used, when and where they occur, and how deadly they are.
What the Numbers Show
From 2000 to 2024, the dataset records 379 incidents and 487 deaths at religious congregations and religious community centers. Most involved a single victim, but some – like the recent shootings in Michigan and Minnesota – killed or injured many people.
About 7 in 10 incidents involved firearms, accounting for three-quarters of the deaths. Firearm cases averaged about 1.4 deaths each, compared with 1.1 for nonfirearm cases.
Handguns were the most common weapon, linked to more than 100 incidents and 147 deaths. But semiautomatic rifles, though used in only seven cases, killed 46 people — more than six per attack, on average.
The deadliest year was 2017, when 47 people were killed at places of worship, 42 of them with firearms. Twenty-six of those people were killed in a single catastrophic shooting at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas.
‘Mass Shootings’
Mass shootings are often defined as attacks that kill four or more people. Using that threshold, the data shows 10 incidents since 2000 at houses of worship. Lower the bar to three killed, and there are 14; at two killed, 40.
Definitions shape perception. Most people associate mass shootings with high-profile tragedies like the massacres at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 or Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. But many other attacks, like the tragedy at Annunciation in Minneapolis, involve two or three deaths. Each represents a profound loss for a community.
