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No single definition fully covers both mass murder and serial murder. Both crimes are types of multiple murders in that they involve the killing of multiple victims by the same offenders. What has been called “mass murder” or a "mass killing" involves the killing of three or more people within a single occurrence. “Serial murder” also involves the killing of at least three to five people by a single perpetrator but is differentiated from mass murder in that it is carried out over a longer period of time—at least one week but usually months or even years.

Mass shootings are violent incidents involving the use of firearms to kill or injure multiple people. There is no standard definition of what number of victims constitutes a "mass" shooting, but in a 2015 report, the US Congressional Research Service defined such incidents as having at least four victims (not counting the shooter or shooters themselves, in the event that they are injured or killed). This threshold is followed by most outlets, although some count only deaths while others include both those killed and wounded as victims. Common use of the term also usually excludes combat between established military or paramilitary groups.

On December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Peter Lanza, a native of Newtown, Connecticut, walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown and perpetrated one of the deadliest mass shootings by a single person in US history. The incident left twenty children ages six and seven and school staff members dead; the massacre ended only after Lanza took his own life as law enforcement and first responders arrived on the scene. The shooting was the sixteenth and final mass shooting spree that took place in 2012 and came a mere five months after another deadly mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Partly due to the age of the victims, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School shocked the nation and sparked an intense national debate on gun control and awareness of mental illness at both the state and federal levels.