CINCINNATI >> After the slaughter of nine worshippers at a South Carolina church in June 2015, but before the massacre of eight students and a teacher at an Oregon community college in October, there was a shooting that the police here have labeled Incident 159022597.01. It happened on a clear Friday night at an Elks Lodge, on a modest block of clapboard houses northeast of this city’s hilly downtown. Unlike the butchery that bookended it, it merited no presidential statements, no saturation television coverage.

But what took place at 6101 Prentice St. on Aug. 21 may say more about the nature of gun violence in the United States than any of those far more famous rampages. It is a snapshot of a different sort of mass violence — one that erupts with such anesthetic regularity that it is rendered almost invisible, except to the mostly black victims, survivors and attackers.

According to the police account, more than 30 people had gathered in the paneled basement bar of the lodge to mark the 39th birthday of a man named Greg Wallace when a former neighbor, Timothy Murphy, showed up, drunk. Fists flew. Murphy ducked out the door, burst back in with a handgun, and opened fire.

As partygoers scrambled for the door, he chased Wallace’s younger brother Dawaun to a tiny black-and-white-tiled bathroom, where he shot him nine times before the violence spilled out onto the street. There, another Wallace relative, also armed with a handgun, fired back at him.

By the end, 27 bullets had flown, hitting seven people: Murphy, who died; Dawaun Wallace, who was grievously wounded; four bystanders, one of whom was hit in the genitals, another in the leg.

And Barry Washington.

A seasonal packer for Amazon.com, Washington, 56, had stopped at the lodge on his way to the store for cigarettes, said his sister, Jaci Washington. He was in the bathroom when Murphy cornered Dawaun Wallace there. A single bullet pierced Barry Washington’s arm, then his heart.

He left behind a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a mother and four grandchildren.

“My brother died on the floor of a bathroom for no reason,” Jaci Washington said. “He had nothing to do with the whole situation. I can’t believe I lost my brother like this.”

Yet many in the neighborhood where they grew up, she said, responded with a shrug. “The reality is, this happens quite frequently,” she said. “And it’s kind of, ‘Oh, well, this guy was killed today. Somebody else will be killed tomorrow.’”

That is more than correct. The Elks Lodge episode was one of at least 358 armed encounters nationwide last year — nearly one a day, on average — in which four or more people were killed or wounded, including attackers. The toll: 462 dead and 1,330 injured, sometimes for life, typically in bursts of gunfire lasting but seconds.

In some cities, law enforcement officials say a growing share of shootings involve more than one victim, possibly driven by increased violence between street gangs. But data are scarce.

Seeking deeper insight into the phenomenon, The New York Times identified and analyzed 358 shootings with four or more casualties, drawing on two databases assembled from news reports and citizen contributors, and then verifying details with law enforcement agencies.

Only a small handful were high-profile mass shootings like those in South Carolina and Oregon. The rest are a pencil sketch of everyday America at its most violent.

They chronicle how easily lives are shattered when a firearm is readily available — in a waistband, a glove compartment, a mailbox or garbage can that serves as a gang’s gun locker. They document the mayhem spawned by the most banal of offenses: a push in a bar, a Facebook taunt, the wrong choice of music at a house party. They tally scores of unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time: an 11-month-old clinging to his mother’s hip, shot as she prepared to load him into a car; a 77-year-old church deacon, killed by a stray bullet while watching television on his couch.

The shootings took place everywhere, but mostly outdoors: at neighborhood barbecues, family reunions, music festivals, basketball tournaments, movie theaters, housing project courtyards, Sweet 16 parties, public parks. Where motives could be gleaned, roughly half involved or suggested crime or gang activity. Arguments that spun out of control accounted for most other shootings, followed by acts of domestic violence.

The typical victim was a man between 18 and 30, but more than 1 in 10 were 17 or younger. Less is known about those who pulled the triggers because nearly half of the cases remain unsolved. But of those arrested or identified as suspects, the average age was 27.

Most of the shootings occurred in economically downtrodden neighborhoods. These shootings, by and large, are not a middle-class phenomenon.

The divide is racial as well. Among the cases examined by The Times were 39 domestic violence shootings, and they largely involved white attackers and victims. So did many of the high-profile massacres, including a wild shootout between Texas biker gangs that left nine people dead and 18 wounded.

Overall, though, nearly three-fourths of victims and suspected assailants whose race could be identified were black. Some experts suggest that helps explain why the drumbeat of dead and wounded does not inspire more outrage.

“Clearly, if it’s black-on-black, we don’t get the same attention because most people don’t identify with that. Most Americans are white,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston. “People think, ‘That’s not my world. That’s not going to happen to me.’”

Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor, who is black, said that society would not be so complacent if whites were dying from gun violence at the same rate as blacks.

“The general view is it’s one bad black guy who has shot another bad black guy,” he said. “And so, one less person to worry about.”

In Cincinnati, where last year’s toll of 479 gun deaths and injuries was the highest in nine years, a growing share of shootings involve more than one victim — 1 in 8 attacks with guns in the first half of last year compared with 1 in 12 over the same span in 2010.

Police officials in some other cities have noted a similar trend, though others say they have not. What is behind the upticks, they said, is a matter of speculation.

In Rochester, New York, multiple-victim shootings accounted for fewer than 15 percent of victims in 2006; so far this year, they make up 38 percent. Police Chief Michael Ciminelli said that he suspected that social media was playing a role by simultaneously catalyzing minor disputes into deadly standoffs and drawing more people into them.

Larry C. Smith, interim chief of police in Durham, North Carolina, and a 28-year veteran of the force, said, “Are we starting to reap the video-game age? I don’t know.”

“But five, or certainly 10 years ago,” he added, “it wasn’t like this.”

The Elks Lodge shooting was one of five last year in Cincinnati that resulted in at least four casualties. The others took place on street corners, on a front porch and at a cookout in a parking lot.

Police officials say they suspect that as many as half of the 24 victims were not the intended targets; community workers blame self-taught gunmen who are often high on drugs or were drunk. “They are not marksmen,” said Aaron Pullins, an anti-violence worker. “They don’t know how to hold the gun. They just shoot.”

Ali-Rashid Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the potential for further gunfire.

They see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly addresses.

“White folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Abdullah, who is black.

No one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans. Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.

Most parents Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.” And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.

“‘Not my child,’” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive mother. “‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I raised my child.’”

His reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children, slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our responsibility first.”

African-Americans make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.

Barry Washington was a neighborhood fixture in Madisonville, a racially mixed community of small, neat homes in northeastern Cincinnati where he grew up. Slim, handsome and barely 5-foot-3, he had an infectious smile and a weakness for hats.

He helped out hard-up families at the Presbyterian church, and brought household goods to the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his 77-year-old mother, Amanda.

“An all-around good guy,” said his sister, Jaci.

Sometime before 11 p.m. on Aug. 21, Barry Washington left his apartment, telling his niece he needed cigarettes. His mother was in bed, watching a police drama.

The next morning, Jaci Washington awoke to a blizzard of text messages about a shooting. She called her mother, who said her brother had not come home.

Soon Amanda Washington’s phone rang: a detective, asking repeatedly whether she was alone.

“Why? What happened to my son?” she demanded. “Is he dead?”

Barry Washington had stopped at the Elks Lodge. Greg Wallace’s party was underway in the basement bar.

Wallace and his brother Dawaun had recently been feuding with Timothy Murphy. The three men had grown up together in the neighborhood, and as adults had each been convicted of drug trafficking, court records show. Murphy’s mother, Christine Poindexter, said her son was upset because the Wallaces were selling drugs out of his father’s house.

The argument resumed when Murphy showed up at the party, and ended only when Murphy was dead and Dawaun Wallace had been peppered with nine bullets. Tests of Murphy’s blood later revealed nearly three times the legal alcohol level and evidence of recent marijuana use.

Barry Washington’s death was collateral damage — a stray bullet, meant for Dawaun.

Nine months later, Washington’s family is still reeling.

“I don’t want pity. I want results,” Jaci Washington said. “One more black shooting in a black neighborhood. ‘Let’s rally around.’ It’s a facade. When all is said and done, we’re still left with the grief.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company