The number of mass shootings in the U.S. fell by more than 27% in 2024, but the overall number of active assailant attacks remains higher compared to the pre-COVID-19 average. The prevalence of workplace violence and mass shootings has led California, New York, and other states to implement new legislation requiring workplace violence prevention plans in retail, healthcare, and other sectors.
Heightened political polarization and heated rhetoric posed new threats to the integrity of the U.S. election system, with former President Donald Trump surviving two assassination attempts during the campaign. Concerns over post-election violence eased after Trump’s decisive victory, but the assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO raised new concerns about threats to business leaders in politically salient industries.
Authorities continued to combat the threat of terrorism by lone individuals radicalized by religious and political extremist content online. Federal authorities foiled several plots by individuals inspired by or affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) in 2024. During New Year’s Day 2025, an IS sympathizer carried out a vehicle ramming attack in New Orleans, underscoring the persistent risk of extremist violence.
Figure 1: Number of mass shootings and mass murders in the U.S. by year
Source: GVA and FBI
Active assailant attacks are a longstanding risk in the U.S., which has some of the highest rates of gun violence among advanced economies. Firearms are overrepresented in active assailant attacks due to the high rate of gun ownership and the relative ease of acquiring a firearm in the U.S. Knives and other weapons have also been used by active assailants to carry out attacks, although the prevalence of non-firearm incidents is not reliably tracked, unlike gun violence.
According to data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), there were 503 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2024, defined as any shooting with four or more victims injured or killed, not including the assailant. This represents a 27% decrease in mass shootings compared to 2023, when the GVA recorded 689 mass shootings. Mass murders, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines as four or more victims killed, recorded a similar decline of 25% – with incidents falling from 40 in 2023 to 30 in 2024. The sharp declines in mass shootings and mass murders in 2024 map closely to a broader reduction in violent crime across the U.S., which surged following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the reduction in gun violence, the number of mass shootings remains starkly elevated compared to the pre-COVID era of 2015-2019 when the U.S. averaged 362.2 mass shootings annually. The number of mass murders also remains elevated compared to the 2015-2019 average of 23.2 mass murders annually. It remains unclear what is driving these higher rates of mass violence, which first spiked in 2021 as lockdown measures and other economic restrictions were lifted. Higher rates of mass shootings and mass murder may be partially attributed to the lasting effects of the pandemic era, which led to significant social upheaval and disruptions to daily life – including in work, school, and relationships. It could also be attributed to the growing levels of polarization influencing individuals receptive to extreme ideals to commit violence.
According to the FBI, active assailants display an average of 3.6 stressors in the lead up to an attack. The five most common stressors include mental health, financial strain, job related, conflict with friends or peers, and marital problems. For some active assailants, these stressors may have been brought about or exacerbated by the pandemic. As the U.S. continues to recover economically and socially from the COVID-19 era these stressors have eased for some potential assailants but remained for others – especially if these stressors were brought about by more permanent economic or interpersonal changes. More time is needed to assess whether gun violence and active assailant attacks will continue to decline in the U.S. as the pandemic era becomes more distant, or if the current rate of mass shootings will persist.
Some state lawmakers in the U.S. continued efforts to combat active assailant attacks, with a focus on workplace violence across several industries. In July 2024, California’s Senate Bill 553 went into effect. Passed in 2023, the law requires nearly all private employers in California to implement plans to prevent specific types of workplace violence.
Shortly after California implemented SB 553, New York passed the Retail Worker Safety Act. Like SB 553, the RWSA requires most retail stores – not including restaurants – to implement plans to prevent specific types of workplace violence and train their employees on them. In addition, retailers with more than 500 employees will be required to install panic buttons that can immediately request security assistance in an emergency. The RWSA will go into effect on 1 June 2025, except for the panic button requirement, which will begin on 1 January 2027.
Across parts of the U.S., state lawmakers have increasingly focused on combating active assailant attacks in the healthcare sector, which historically has some of the highest rates of workplace violence, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Multiple states – including California, Ohio, and North Carolina – have passed laws specifically aimed at improving the prevention of workplace violence in hospitals, including laws requiring law enforcement in emergency departments and the formulation of specific violence prevention plans.
Figure 2: Incidence rate of DART cases per 10,000 full-time workers across the U.S. 2021-2022
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Figure 3: Most prevalent risk by country
Source: Alert:24
United States: Former President Donald Trump was elected to a second term in office. Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in a closely contested race that had been upended by President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election midway through the campaign. Trump has vowed sweeping changes in his second term, including universal tariffs, the large-scale deportation of unauthorized migrants, and reforms to the U.S. relationship to NATO and other key allies.
Canada: Growing voter backlash over the cost of living and a surge in immigration caused new rifts in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberal Party. Trudeau announced his resignation in early January 2025 to allow the liberals to pick a new premier and party leader ahead of federal elections in October.
Haiti: Violence continued to wrack Haiti, with armed gangs seizing most of the capital Port-au-Prince and shutting down the country’s main international airport. More than 5,600 people were killed in 2024 and the number of internally displaced persons tripled, according to UN figures. A new interim government backed by the U.S. has struggled to project power and pave the way for legitimate elections.
Cuba: The island was hit by a series of nationwide power blackouts in 2024, compounding Cuba’s ongoing economic crisis and spurring further migration from the country. At least five blackouts occurred, largely due to shortages of fuel and spare parts. Blackouts caused widespread protests in the capital Havana and Santiago de Cuba and placed further pressure on the government to improve living conditions on the island.
Martinique: In September, violent protests over the cost of living and inequality broke out across Martinique, an overseas department of France. At least one person was killed and dozens more were injured. President Emmanuel Macron deployed French riot police, whose presence had been banned on the island for decades, to restore order.
At the start of 2024, there were concerns that growing political polarization and increasingly caustic rhetoric online would heighten the chance of political violence in the lead up to the U.S. presidential election. These fears were exacerbated by two failed assassination attempts against then-candidate Donald Trump, including a shooting at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that injured Trump and killed a supporter of his. Despite the two assassination attempts against Trump, the election passed without notable outbreaks of violence or other politically motivated unrest. This was largely due to the decisive outcome of the election, which saw Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris by sweeping all the competitive battleground states. Trump’s win left little room for opposition groups to seriously question the results, and Harris quickly conceded and vowed to observe a peaceful transfer of power, removing any remaining impetus to contest the outcome.
While the presidential election passed without serious incident, the December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel raised concerns about new forms of political violence targeting non-governmental figures and private business leaders. Reports suggest that Luigi Mangione, the accused gunman, harbored specific grievances against the health insurance industry, potentially exacerbated by a lower back injury he sustained earlier in the year. It remains unclear if Mangione held specific grievances towards UHC and Thomspon or rather decided on a target out of convenience.
Thompson’s assassination has raised concerns that other potentially unstable or aggrieved individuals could target executives and business leaders in industries involved in contentious political and social issues. This could include companies in the fossil fuel, natural resources, defense, healthcare, and insurance industries for example.
During the early morning of 1 January 2025, an IS sympathizer drove his truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more. Authorities identified the attacker as Shamsud Din Jabbar, a Texas resident and former U.S. Army soldier. Evidence suggests that Jabbar was radicalized into supporting IS within the last year after experiencing multiple stressors – including a series of divorces, financial troubles, and business failures.
The New Orleans attack was the first successful terror attack in the U.S. by Islamist extremists in years but was not an isolated event. The number of individuals arrested for terror plots in the U.S. is low, but in the past year, federal authorities have disrupted multiple terror plots by individuals loosely affiliated with or inspired by the IS. In October 2024, authorities indicted a man in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who sought to carry out an attack on Election Day on behalf of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-KP), a branch based in Afghanistan. The defendant was allegedly in contact with IS recruiters and purchased firearms from FBI informants. That same month, prosecutors in Arizona arrested a juvenile for plotting to bomb an LGBTQ pride parade in Phoenix in support of IS.
These plots and others demonstrate the persistent risk posed by individuals who are radicalized online and plan their attacks with little or no coordination with outside groups. These individuals may demonstrate similar stressors to other active assailants; however, like Shamsud Din Jabbar, they ultimately choose to carry out their attacks in support of extremist political and religious ideologies. There are multiple pathways towards radicalization, especially online, and individuals may hold seemingly incongruent and contradictory beliefs that do not map clearly onto the mainstream understanding of left-right politics. The trend towards conspiracist movements online has further blurred ideological lines, with certain conspiratorial beliefs being held by both left-wing and right-wing extremists.
The North America and Caribbean region typically sees the same select countries – Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, and Haiti – report the majority of the region’s cases. Haiti currently has UN peacekeeping troops attempting to tackle a series of overlapping crises, mostly driven by political instability, extreme poverty, and widespread criminality, violence, and corruption. These are typically ideal conditions for kidnappers. Organized crime groups are identified as the sole perpetrators of kidnap in Haiti, with a handful of gangs dominating large parts of the country’s territory. Whilst the security mission led by Kenyan police has been unable to gain the upper hand, it may partly explain why reported kidnap for ransom figures in Q4 are assessed to be 40% lower. However, the situation remains grave, with dozens of brutal kidnap for ransom cases – nearly always targeting local civilians (for lack of available wealthier targets) – continuing to go unreported. The situation in Haiti is very unlikely to see a major turnaround, with little appetite by world leaders to commit the necessary resources to aid the country. The Dominican Republic has set up a militarized security presence along its border with Haiti, which is currently closed to travellers, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future in a bid to protect itself from the impacts of mass migration and complicate the efforts of criminal networks in both countries from collaborating.
This coming year is likely to prove consequential for North America as President Donald Trump returns to power in the U.S. During his campaign, Trump promised significant change and has nominated officials to his cabinet that have called for sweeping reforms to trade, immigration, national security, taxes, and healthcare. It is unclear to what extent Trump will follow through on certain campaign promises, some of which will prove highly controversial. The Republican-controlled Congress is keen to deliver Trump’s agenda, but a slim Grand Old Party (GOP) majority in the House of Representatives and the lack of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is likely to temper any legislative reforms, especially on taxes and healthcare.
Despite these possible legislative limitations, the executive branch holds significant unilateral power over tariffs and immigration, bolstered by longstanding Supreme Court precedent. Trump can impose many tangible reforms via executive order without the need to consult congress, especially if national security can be invoked.
Whilst 2024, saw the U.S. host over 10,000 incidents of civil unrest over a myriad of issues – with the majority of demonstrations relating to workers’ rights/conditions and the Israel-Gaza conflict – the imposition of some of Trump’s most controversial policies could spur renewed civil unrest in the U.S. in 2025. Although anti-Trump mobilizations in the immediate aftermath of the election were muted, the potentially disruptive nature of tariffs and deportations may prompt unrest. In some cases, this could also lead to renewed political violence by unstable, politically aggrieved, or radicalized individuals.
Much of what happens elsewhere in North America is also partially dependent on developments within the U.S.; Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau saw his approval rating plummet throughout 2024 as voters became increasingly discontent over the cost of living, immigration, and concerns that Canada’s economy was failing to keep pace with the U.S. The opposition Conservative Party looks poised to return to power in federal elections this October. While tariffs imposed by the U.S. could bolster their political standing, the incoming conservative government would have to find immediate measures to cope with the impact these may have on Canada’s own economy and find ways to accommodate an increasingly adversarial Trump administration.
The threat of terrorism is likely to persist in 2025 as extremist groups continue to seek out ways to carry out attacks, particularly in Canada and the U.S. The foiled Election Day attack in the U.S. shows IS-KP’s desire to expand its operational reach, either through recruitment or online radicalization. From its base in Afghanistan, IS-KP has proven to be the IS branch most eager and capable of organizing transnational terrorist attacks (see Europe section). Its efforts to radicalize and recruit individuals in the West means the group is likely to remain a top security threat in North America over the next year.
Figure 4: Heatmap of civil unrest incidents across North America and the Caribbean in 2024
Source: ACLED
