204 mass shooting cases in US in 2015: Report

WASHINGTON: Over 200 mass shooting incidents have been reported in the US this year, with the latest shootout at Lousiana movie theatre that killed three people, including the shooter, according to a media report.

There were 18 mass shootings in April, 39 in May, 41 in June, and 34 so far in July. The theatre shooting was Louisiana's 8th this year. There have been 10 in Ohio, 14 in California and 16 in New York, The Washington Post reported.

The Louisiana movie theatre shooting takes the total number of shootouts to 204. Incidentally, the day of the shooting was also the 204th day of the year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowd-sourced project, it said.

In the latest shootout, the gunman was a 58-year old white man who opened fire from his weapon at a movie theatre in Louisiana on Thursday. Later he shot himself, the Lafayette City Police Chief Jim Craft told reporters.

At least seven people have been injured in the shootout, some of them with life threatening wounds, the police said.

The shooter died of self-inflicted wounds. The police say they have located the shooter's car across the street from the theatre parking lot and out of an "abundance of caution" called in the bomb squad.

The Mass Shooting Tracker lists 203 mass shooting events so far in 2015. The Mass Shooting Tracker uses a broader definition of mass shooting, Washington Post reported.

"The old FBI definition of Mass Murder (not even the most recent one) is four or more people murdered in one event," the site's creators explain. "It is only logical that a Mass Shooting is four or more people shot in one event," the Post reported.

"Will anything change?" the Post asked and itself answered "Probably not" noting the reaction to the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white young man shot and killed nine black worshippers at a historic church.

It "did produce a fruitful national conversation -- not on guns, but on the symbolism of the Confederate flag, which the shooter adopted as a banner of his racist beliefs," the Post noted.