Is April more violent than any other month of the year?

In the wake of the terrible and tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, there are still a lot of questions, and one of the overshadowing ones is 'why'?

It's unclear if we'll have an answer any time soon about this particular act of violence, whether the date was chosen for some symbolic reason or if the crowds gathered for the Marathon simply offered a convenient target for the perpetrator's (or perpetrators') cruelty. However, it seems that many are asking if the month of April itself is prone to acts of mass violence, and this is a question that has apparently been on peoples' minds for several years now.

[ Related: Full coverage of the Boston Marathon Bombing ]

Some of the most public and shocking acts of mass violence have occurred in the month of April.

Going back just 30 years, there has been:
· the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut on April 18, 1983 that claimed 83 lives,
· the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, that resulted in the deaths of 81 people,
· the Oklahoma City bombing on on April 19th, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and his conspirators detonated a bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring over 600 others
· the Columbine High School massacre on April 20th, 1999, where two students murdered 12 teens and one teacher, and injured several others, before taking their own lives
· the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16th, 2007, when student Seung-Hui Cho shot 49 people, killing 32 of them, then committed suicide
· the shooting of 17 people by Jiverly Antares Wong on April 3rd, 2009 at an immigration centre in Binghamton, New York that resulted in 13 deaths
· the attack on the Dutch Royal Parade on April 30th, 2009, when a man drove his car through the crowd, killing 7 people and injuring 17 others
· the Rio de Janeiro school shooting on April 7th, 2011, when a lone gunman killed 12 school children and wounded 12 others before killing himself
· the Oikos University shooting on April 2nd, 2012, in Oakland, California that resulted in 7 dead and three wounded

I'm sure there's ones that I've missed. Going even further back, April 19th, 1775 marks the first battle of the American Revolutionary War.

Do all these incidences show that April is more violent than other months, though?

The dates of several of the violent acts listed above were specifically chosen to coincide with violent acts of the past.

Although it's likely just a coincidence that the FBI chose the same date as the start of the Revolutionary War as the date of their attempt to break the siege at Waco, Timothy McVeigh chose the date of the Oklahoma City bombing to fall on the same date as the Waco, Texas incident, and according to a CNN interview from 2011, even the forged drivers license he used to rent the truck for the bombing had the date of the FBI raid as the date of issuance. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the murderers in the Columbine shooting chose the date of their attack to coincide with the Oklahoma City bombing, as their original plan of having two bombs go off in the school was set for April 19th. It's only when those bombs failed to go off that they changed their plan and entered the school with guns the following day. There's also some indication that Seung-Hui Cho may have chosen the date for his attacks at Virginia Tech based on some connection he felt with the Columbine killers.

As for the rest, it's all likely just coincidence.

According to a LiveScience article, based on information from the U.S. National Counterterrorim Center, there is a "worldwide history of attacks on almost every day of the year."

Also, according to a Mother Jones article from February 27th, and especially their chronological chart of mass shootings in the United States since 1982, these tragic events are spread out throughout the year, with only 5 of the 62 mass shootings from August 1982 to December 2012 falling in the month of April.

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Being able to pin down an increased amount of mass violence during a specific part of the year would certainly help us avoid these tragedies in the future, but the unfortunate fact is that acts of violence happen around the world all the time. Efforts are being made to track these events, and possibly predict future attacks.

(Photo courtesy: Adrees Latif/Reuters)

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