“defines a mass shooting as an incident with at least four injuries or deaths, not including the shooter.”
Which isn’t really a good definition. “Mass shooting” invokes an image of someone showing up at a school, church, grocery store, some other public place, with the sole intent of killing as many people as possible.
That’s not what’s being tracked here.
The classic example tracked by the Gun Violence Archive is this story from my own town:
Two brothers had an illegal marijuana grow. 3 guys from Texas roll up at their house to buy the weed.
It’s not clear what went wrong, but words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers were shot and killed, 2/3 Texans were shot and killed. 3rd was arrested later.
No, that’s pretty average drug crime right there. No innocent victims, everyone involved was engaging in illegal activity BEFORE anyone got shot.
Going through the stories on the Gun Violence Archive, you’ll see a lot of arguments turned into bar fights turned into shootings and so on. Parties that got out of hand, stuff like that. Scenarios that are completely different from some idiot intending to shoot up a school, or target a minority demographic.
Lumping together all of that under the “Mass Shooting” umbrella sure gets people scared though.
Anytime one of them stops replying, you can imagine they were amid picking their nose with their toy gun when something went wrong. But it’s okay - only one person dies when that happens, so it’s not a mass shooting.
No, I’m saying you need to differentiate crimes where someone went out intending to shoot a bunch of people, from crimes where a bunch of people ended up being shot through bad circumstances.
It’s the difference between 4 people dying in a car accident vs. someone intentionally driving over 4 people. It’s a different class of crime.
Ah, but in your country you lack the freedom to be accidentally shot along with at least 3 other people not including the shooter, so who really loses here? 😏
Better laws, not just gun laws. That’s my whole point. The current Supreme Court is leaning towards fewer gun restrictions, not more. We CAN change that, but it will likely take decades of voting for Democrats.
Until then, we need to get it out of our heads that we can ban guns. The court isn’t going to allow that and every ruling they strike down makes it worse.
We need to look at OTHER laws we can pass that don’t involve the 2nd Amendment.
We already have background checks, but what shows up on a background check is flawed, that needs to change.
We have red flag laws, but there’s no consistent standard for who can invoke them and when and not all states have them, we might want to consider a national red flag law.
Those are the discussions we need to have, but aren’t having, because people are hung up talking about things the court will never allow.
It’s not really what most people would consider a mass shooting when 2 gang rivals have a shootout. Nor is it a representation of something a normal person would be exposed to.
Okay, let’s for the sake of your argument exclude organized criminally activity.
The fact that “bar fights escalate into gun fights” is fucking terrifying in its own right. And how on God’s green earth isn’t it absolutely insane that a “party that got out of hand” turns into gun violence?
In most civilized societies I’m not say risk of becoming a gun violence statistic for going to a party or an establishment that sells alcohol. The fact that this gets so casually ignored as “not a mass shooting, even though it involved multiple people getting shot” is part of the problem.
Oh, I didn’t say it’s not scary, I’m saying a group of angry people, fueled by alcohol, shooting at each other is an ENTIRELY different class of crime from some psycho intentionally hunting people, and they shouldn’t be grouped together.
In the case of a bar/club fight, nobody went down there intending to shoot somebody. It worked out that way, but that wasn’t the intent.
Totally different from, say, the Pulse Nightclub shooting where carnage was the driving purpose.
I get your point about motive, but I’d argue it’s only relevant depending on your argument. If the argument is “we need gun control and government buy-backs to reduce gun violence through the availability of firearms” then using mass shooting statistics as defined by the gun violence archive is relevant. If the argument is “we need better mental health facilities to prevent people enacting public mass violence intentionally” your perspective is relevant.
Honestly thought, I would argue the US is so far down the hole any measure is better than nothing. Either fix gun ownership, the insane number of guns on the market, the mental health crisis, or any of these at once and you’ll see improvements. Anything but “thoughts and prayers”.
My personal belief is that the Gun Violence Archive is disingenuous in their definition and they phrase things the way they do in order to scare as many people as possible.
What I’d like to see is a case by case analysis of what went wrong, then take steps to correct for it. Do that enough times and the problem goes away.
Cops knew he was a threat a week before the shooting, but thought he was too dangerous to confront. O_O Wouldn’t that be the ideal reason to confront him?
Agreed, that is pretty ridiculous in its own right. It does show how the police aren’t there to “serve and protect” though, which really makes you wonder what their purpose is in modern society.
“The Supreme Court ruled on Monday (June, 2005) that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.”
It’s not clear what went wrong, but words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers were shot and killed, 2/3 Texans were shot and killed. 3rd was arrested later.
No, that’s pretty average drug crime right there.
Jesus Christ.
“defines a mass shooting as an incident with at least four injuries or deaths, not including the shooter.”
Which isn’t really a good definition.
Going by that definition there have been 56 total mass shootings in Canada… from 2001 to 2023. This year there have been five, with 11 total deaths and 30 injuries.
I know we have 1/9th the population, but we sure don’t have anywhere near 1/9th the shootings. We have 1/130th.
Sure, but it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to define that in objective terms. A shooting involving 4 or more people is easy to collect all the data on. Trying to search for all shootings where someone showed up to an event with the intent to kill many people isn’t really objective or trackable.
Maybe filter out those where both sides are armed, or only count mass shootings when the aggressor went in expecting the victims to not be armed.
The way this is presented gives the impression crime rates, not just mass shootings are way up. Even though it doesn’t specifically say that it’s misleading.
Under my suggestion that would count as a mass shooting. Most malls have do not carry signs at the entrances, so the spree killer expects them to not be armed.
The definition is evolving, for the better in my opinion. The below paper describes some thoughts in the realm which seek to develop a more inclusive definition.
Mass outcome or mass intent? A proposal for an intent-focused, no-minimum casualty count definition of public mass shooting incidents
First, researchers should expand their victim count inclusion criterion to gain valuable insight for public mass shooting prevention, intervention, and harm mitigation. The proposed definition of public mass shootings highlights mass intent instead of the completion of the shooting. Datasets with minimum victim counts are only including cases that occurred in the absence of mitigating situational factors, like fast intervention or strong situational crime prevention. There is always the potential for the environment and the situation to influence the incident outcome, and open-source scholars implementing a minimum casualty criterion might be systematically excluding cases characterized by mass intent and protective environments. Not only does this affect comparisons of environmental and mitigation factors, but it is an especially problematic source of selection bias for scholars aiming to understand the warning signs, behaviors, and psychosocial profiles of public mass shooting perpetrators.
Second, we advocate for scholars to use the current public mass shooting definition and completed, attempted, failed, and foiled outcome terminology. Critics may argue that our proposed definition more so aligns with an active shooter incident than a public mass shooting. However, we believe that it is beneficial to combine these two types of public gun violence involving random/symbolic victims into a single public mass shooting concept differentiated by outcomes. This will not only strengthen the rigor of empirical research, but also reduce public confusion. Currently, the mass media and general public are familiar with the phrases “public mass shooting” and “active shooting”, and understand both to be incidents of public, predatory gun violence committed by a highly motivated offender. We believe our definition, with its careful distinction between foiled, failed, attempted, and completed outcomes, could address some of the “mass confusion” (Fox & Levin, 2022) regarding public mass shootings.
Critics may argue that our proposal for an intent-focused, no minimum casualty count definition could contribute to journalistic abuse and further public confusion or concern. For comparison, after high-profile public mass shootings, media outlets often cite the number of mass shootings in America using the Gun Violence Archive and Mass Shooting Tracker data – which includes all mass shootings (i.e., felony and family), not just public mass shootings (Silva & Greene-Colozzi, 2019). The media thereby conflates all mass shootings with public mass shootings in the public consciousness. We do not want a consequence of this proposed public mass shooting definition to be the media’s inflation of the problem, given the increased number of incidents included in future research and datasets using this definition. To this end, we stress the importance of researchers using the completed public mass shooting terminology when referencing traditionally considered incidents - involving four or more fatalities – in research and during media interviews. In other words, like the usage of public mass shootings - which has recently become more popular in media usage - we are attempting to also incorporate completed public mass shootings into popular consciousness, to address public confusion and concerns.
Edit: I should add I have no beef with the GVA, and I don’t really think the flack it gets in this thread is warranted, but in this context the distinction I think can help. This is by no means GVA’s fault, terms evolve.
The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition. Only shootings that have Wikipedia articles of their own are included in this list.
Yeah, no. Not really. It’s useful, but it’s a much smaller subset. This is all notable mass shootings, not all mass shootings. As the article later goes on to describe, the definition is in contention. There are many different definitions that may include far fewer or far more events, just because of the nature of it it can’t be perfect.
And yet when you track crime, hopefully you have the intent of using that to prevent and deter future crimes, and if you end up treating a school shooting like a bar fight or vice versa, you’re not gonna get the results you want. The victims conditions are not the reason for crime statistics, I doubt it matters much what the victims were thinking when it comes to preventing future perps.
Yea, that is a much better representation. These big made up numbers they share are just designed to make people fearful, and underestimate how safe we actually are.
I’m not sure I understand why intent matters (barring accidents, I suppose)?
Who cares what the intent was if guns were involved and people were hurt or died?
If a person is suffering from schizophrenia and thinks they are holding a magic wand, but actually shoot up a mall, they don’t have intent but the gun violence still resulted in death. Would that not be a mass shooting in your intent-based definition?
Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.
These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?
What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.
You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong.
No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.
You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!
Intent matters because in a true mass shooting event, the mass shooting is the intent.
In an argument turned into a fight with multiple shooters, nobody went out that day looking to shoot people. It turned out that way, but that wasn’t their goal when they left the house.
Your explaining the difference but not explaining why it makes a difference.
To matters of gun regulation, of safety in public spaces, of trauma to the affected, of national reputation (pick any one, or all, or something else) why does the intent change anything?
I’ll start off: To have the intention to mass-murder purely for the sake of mass murder could be worth isolating and studying because that is a specific and extreme psychological problem worth solving. However, not all mass killings (with intent, for your sake) will have that psychological trigger at root. A religious or racial extremist, for example, is different than a disaffected teenager.
In this circumstance, intent is interesting if one is interested in those other things (psychological issues in American youth, the spread of religious and racial extremism), but ultimately are secondary issues when it comes to measuring gun violence. A mass stabbing by a racial extremist, or a teenager blowing up their high school with fertilizer would still need to be measured.
You are complaining about this organization’s yardstick, but I don’t hear a compelling alternative from you for this specific measure. You are saying they should be measuring a totally different thing, which is arguably irrelevant to this measure.
It’s like explaining the dufference between murder and manslaughter, it’s the degree of the crime that counts.
If you accept that there is a difference between shooting people as a crime of passion, and shooting people by a systemic hunting of other human beings, there doesn’t need to be a “but why is it different?”
It’s different because one, anyone could fall victim to given enough alcohol and anger, and the other requires someone to be fundamentally broken as a human being.
Are you saying that we should have Allowlists vs. Denylists for types of gun violence that are acceptable? This seems to be the fundamental premise upon which we disagree…
From my POV, intention is immaterial because there are no ‘good’ gun deaths, so splitting hairs has no values.
It sounds to me like you’re saying if you go to a mall and have a mass shooting in a totally sober state, that’s bad, but if you get hopped up on bath salts and then have a good old fashioned shotgun rampage, that’s ok and we shouldn’t count those ones…
I’m saying that the phrase “mass shooting” should only be applied to a situation where the shooting is the reason for the conflict, not an argument, robbery, drug crime, or gang crime.
Further, I’d argue that conflating them all together so you can pump up statistics and make people scared denigrates all the victions of actual mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook.
… Why are you saying and arguing those things, nobody cares about what you think about the way the statistics are counted when you can compare the data to other countries without guns and without any types of shooting events, mass or not.
Do you not understand what all of these different people are trying to explain to you?
Because all the countries with strict gun laws that you all love to try and compare the USA with, also have strong social safety nets and are not as diverse as the USA…why don’t you compare it with say Mexico or Brazil? Both have super strong gun laws but have no real safety nets and surprise…still have tons of firearm related deaths.
I would hope that most mass shootings are preventable given the appropriate analysis.
An example I like to use is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had a prior arrest on a felony gun charge, pled down to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, cleared his background, bought a gun and shot up the place.
So prevention?
How about we make it so that, when it comes to gun charges, there are no plea deals. If he had been a convicted felon, he would not have passed the background check.
Failing that, how about we make gun convictions, felony or misdemeanor, be a blocker for future gun ownership. He already proved he wasn’t a responsible gun owner.
This isn’t about banning guns, this is about controlling what goes on to a background check.
How about we make it so that, when it comes to gun charges, there are no plea deals. If he had been a convicted felon, he would not have passed the background check.
“Get rid of prosecutorial and judicial discretion and force people into prison regardless of anything.”
Brilliant. /s
It was ubiquity and easy access to guns in the first place that made mass murder an option in his mind.
Getting rid of access to guns will not happen because of the 2nd amendment. Changing prosecutorial discretion when it comes to gun charges would be far easier.
20% of 494 million is 98,800,000. So we would have to run the equivalent of the Australian program 152 times (!) to have the same level of impact.
On top of that, we don’t have the facilities to collect and destroy weapons on that scale. We don’t have the personnel or the disposal space, and the track record we DO have on gun confiscations, well, it’s less than stellar:
“Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.”
Yep, Australia had less guns in civ hands that most states that have strong gun laws. It’s a joke when people try and act like a buy back would work…and if it’s a forced one, well good luck finding the law enforcement to go do that and be willing to do so.
Apples to Apples. You can’t compare what happens in other countries to what happens in the US, first because we have the 2nd Amendment and second, because we don’t have universal health care. :(
Oh, right good call, I guess we just have to complain about the way they count the bodies on the internet instead of actually trying to do anything about the thousands of dead children on the hands of the American people and politicians. Totally good call lol.
The post soecifically is about counting shootings and not proposing solutions, if you want to talk solutions I do have some good ideas about that too.
First, people need to get it out of their heads that banning guns is the answer. It can’t be done because of the 2nd Amendment, and changing the 2nd Amendment is a political impossibility. You have to start by getting 290 votes in the House, the same body who needed 15 tries to get a simple 218 vote majority to pick their own leader. 290 on guns is out of reach.
So what DO we do? Well, how about a root cause analysis of each shooting? Let’s determine what systemic failures allowed each shooting to happen and make corrections so it doesn’t happen again.
Like that guy in Maine - Police knew FOR MONTHS that he was a potential danger. The military had warned them. He had psych evals backing it up. The cops decided he was too dangerous to engage with and did nothing. Even though Maine has a yellow flag law for weapon confiscation.
Apparently too dangerous to engage with so they just let him walk around in public? 🤔 Well, there’s your problem.
Shooting after shooting we find these people weren’t unknown to authorities, their lives were filled with more red flags than a May Day Parade, but nothing was done.
First, people need to get it out of their heads that banning guns is the answer.
Right, changing a law is impossible, and looking at other country’s examples is impossible because Americans are all born with itchy trigger fingers lol.
Given our current divisions? Yes, changing the law is impossible. We saw what it takes to get 290 Congressmen to agree… George Santos. You’ll never get a vote like that on guns, or any other hot button issue, abortion, Supreme Court size, term limits… none of it. It’s a non-starter.
Most of the time it’s an alcohol fueled fight that gets out of hand. People were carrying, but they didn’t go out that day INTENDING to shoot somebody.
That differentiates a school/workplace shooting from other sorts of crimes.
“Investigators believe the shooting was targeted and were said to still be “sorting out” whether any of the people who were shot are suspects in the case at the time of this report, as well as if anyone is outstanding, according to the sheriff’s office.”
Sounds like a gang shooting, but probably too soon to tell.
“At the scene, police determined that the shooting was the result of a fight between two groups of people.”
But when you phrase it as “mass shooting” the media repeats it breathlessly and unquestioningly. “OMG! THREE MASS SHOOTINGS ON CHRISTMAS EVE ALONE! Will nobody think of the baby Jesus???”
Which isn’t really a good definition. “Mass shooting” invokes an image of someone showing up at a school, church, grocery store, some other public place, with the sole intent of killing as many people as possible.
No. Mass shooting invokes an image of multiple people being shot.
“LAPD says the victims were attending a New Year’s Eve celebration at an underground party located in the 2300 block of Porter Street when a fight broke out between several people resulting in a shooting.”
Another alcohol/drug fueled argument escalating into a shooting. Not a random event.
This reminds me of the court room scene in Idiocracy where our man is making a logical argument in an intelligent manner and the lawyers, judges and jury are all too fucking stupid to understand “pssssh just look at em!” followed by laughter.
You guys don’t have to agree with the post but if you’re downvoting someone for adding to the discussion, you are fucking up the moderation system.
Edit to add: The moderation system isn’t for rating users or their percieved intellegence. This is going to turn into reddit all over again. Is that what you want?
Engagements like this have actually made me think about my positions and further refine them. I’m at a point where I could actually write a book about it. I should get on that one of these days.
Engagements like this have actually made me think about my positions and further refine them. I’m at a point where I could actually write a book about it. I should get on that one of these days.
“defines a mass shooting as an incident with at least four injuries or deaths, not including the shooter.”
Which isn’t really a good definition. “Mass shooting” invokes an image of someone showing up at a school, church, grocery store, some other public place, with the sole intent of killing as many people as possible.
That’s not what’s being tracked here.
The classic example tracked by the Gun Violence Archive is this story from my own town:
Two brothers had an illegal marijuana grow. 3 guys from Texas roll up at their house to buy the weed.
It’s not clear what went wrong, but words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers were shot and killed, 2/3 Texans were shot and killed. 3rd was arrested later.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2021/06/two-portland-brothers-two-marijuana-buyers-die-in-gun-battle-during-attempted-drug-ripoff.html
Gun Violence Archive - ZOMG! Mass shooting!
No, that’s pretty average drug crime right there. No innocent victims, everyone involved was engaging in illegal activity BEFORE anyone got shot.
Going through the stories on the Gun Violence Archive, you’ll see a lot of arguments turned into bar fights turned into shootings and so on. Parties that got out of hand, stuff like that. Scenarios that are completely different from some idiot intending to shoot up a school, or target a minority demographic.
Lumping together all of that under the “Mass Shooting” umbrella sure gets people scared though.
Mass shootings are so common in America that people are now saying a shooting with four injuries or deaths is too normal to count 😂 😭
EXTREME levels of brain-damaged copium here.
Anytime one of them stops replying, you can imagine they were amid picking their nose with their
toygun when something went wrong. But it’s okay - only one person dies when that happens, so it’s not a mass shooting.No, I’m saying you need to differentiate crimes where someone went out intending to shoot a bunch of people, from crimes where a bunch of people ended up being shot through bad circumstances.
It’s the difference between 4 people dying in a car accident vs. someone intentionally driving over 4 people. It’s a different class of crime.
Are you under the impression that groups of four or more people are being shot by accident?
Absolutely, people get accidentally shot all the time.
If you have two angry groups of people shooting at each other I doubt they’re doing much in the way of good target discipline.
Not in my country 😂
Ah, but in your country you lack the freedom to be accidentally shot along with at least 3 other people not including the shooter, so who really loses here? 😏
One shot is an accident. If you keep shooting it stops being an accident!
Americans are not okay folks!
That’s why I’m moving to Israel
Sure they are different classes of crime… And all would occur fewer times if we had better gun laws.
Better laws, not just gun laws. That’s my whole point. The current Supreme Court is leaning towards fewer gun restrictions, not more. We CAN change that, but it will likely take decades of voting for Democrats.
Until then, we need to get it out of our heads that we can ban guns. The court isn’t going to allow that and every ruling they strike down makes it worse.
We need to look at OTHER laws we can pass that don’t involve the 2nd Amendment.
We already have background checks, but what shows up on a background check is flawed, that needs to change.
We have red flag laws, but there’s no consistent standard for who can invoke them and when and not all states have them, we might want to consider a national red flag law.
Those are the discussions we need to have, but aren’t having, because people are hung up talking about things the court will never allow.
Sounds like SCOTUS is part of the problem.
It’s not really what most people would consider a mass shooting when 2 gang rivals have a shootout. Nor is it a representation of something a normal person would be exposed to.
The bystanders taking strays have entered the chat…
Okay, let’s for the sake of your argument exclude organized criminally activity.
The fact that “bar fights escalate into gun fights” is fucking terrifying in its own right. And how on God’s green earth isn’t it absolutely insane that a “party that got out of hand” turns into gun violence?
In most civilized societies I’m not say risk of becoming a gun violence statistic for going to a party or an establishment that sells alcohol. The fact that this gets so casually ignored as “not a mass shooting, even though it involved multiple people getting shot” is part of the problem.
Oh, I didn’t say it’s not scary, I’m saying a group of angry people, fueled by alcohol, shooting at each other is an ENTIRELY different class of crime from some psycho intentionally hunting people, and they shouldn’t be grouped together.
In the case of a bar/club fight, nobody went down there intending to shoot somebody. It worked out that way, but that wasn’t the intent.
Totally different from, say, the Pulse Nightclub shooting where carnage was the driving purpose.
I get your point about motive, but I’d argue it’s only relevant depending on your argument. If the argument is “we need gun control and government buy-backs to reduce gun violence through the availability of firearms” then using mass shooting statistics as defined by the gun violence archive is relevant. If the argument is “we need better mental health facilities to prevent people enacting public mass violence intentionally” your perspective is relevant.
Honestly thought, I would argue the US is so far down the hole any measure is better than nothing. Either fix gun ownership, the insane number of guns on the market, the mental health crisis, or any of these at once and you’ll see improvements. Anything but “thoughts and prayers”.
My personal belief is that the Gun Violence Archive is disingenuous in their definition and they phrase things the way they do in order to scare as many people as possible.
What I’d like to see is a case by case analysis of what went wrong, then take steps to correct for it. Do that enough times and the problem goes away.
Did you see the latest on the Maine shooter?
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/authorities-knew-maine-shooter-was-a-threat-but-felt-confronting-him-was-unsafe-video-shows/
Cops knew he was a threat a week before the shooting, but thought he was too dangerous to confront. O_O Wouldn’t that be the ideal reason to confront him?
Agreed, that is pretty ridiculous in its own right. It does show how the police aren’t there to “serve and protect” though, which really makes you wonder what their purpose is in modern society.
Oh, man, people have NO idea, this is from almost 20 years ago now:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html
“The Supreme Court ruled on Monday (June, 2005) that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.”
Exactly what I was referring to actually.
Jesus Christ.
Going by that definition there have been 56 total mass shootings in Canada… from 2001 to 2023. This year there have been five, with 11 total deaths and 30 injuries.
I know we have 1/9th the population, but we sure don’t have anywhere near 1/9th the shootings. We have 1/130th.
Yeah, but Canadians are inherently nicer people too! ;)
Sure, but it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to define that in objective terms. A shooting involving 4 or more people is easy to collect all the data on. Trying to search for all shootings where someone showed up to an event with the intent to kill many people isn’t really objective or trackable.
Maybe filter out those where both sides are armed, or only count mass shootings when the aggressor went in expecting the victims to not be armed.
The way this is presented gives the impression crime rates, not just mass shootings are way up. Even though it doesn’t specifically say that it’s misleading.
So a spree killer in a mall who is stopped by an armed person after killing 10 people shouldn’t count as a mass shooting?
Under my suggestion that would count as a mass shooting. Most malls have do not carry signs at the entrances, so the spree killer expects them to not be armed.
The definition is evolving, for the better in my opinion. The below paper describes some thoughts in the realm which seek to develop a more inclusive definition.
Mass outcome or mass intent? A proposal for an intent-focused, no-minimum casualty count definition of public mass shooting incidents
https://jmvr.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/A-Proposal-for-an-Intent-Focused-No-Minimum-Casualty-Count-Definition-of-Public-Mass-Shooting-Incidents-Greene-Colozzi-Silva.pdf
Edit: I should add I have no beef with the GVA, and I don’t really think the flack it gets in this thread is warranted, but in this context the distinction I think can help. This is by no means GVA’s fault, terms evolve.
Wikipedia seems to do OK:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
Yeah, no. Not really. It’s useful, but it’s a much smaller subset. This is all notable mass shootings, not all mass shootings. As the article later goes on to describe, the definition is in contention. There are many different definitions that may include far fewer or far more events, just because of the nature of it it can’t be perfect.
For me, I would define a mass shooting as four or more people shot, not counting the perpetrator, where the shooting itself was the objective.
Not a robbery gone bad, not a drug crime, not a gang fight, or a bar fight.
Someone went to a location with the sole intent of shooting as many people as possible.
I doubt the people caught in the crossfire of a bar fight care that the angry idiots shooting toward them are drunk instead of depressed.
And yet when you track crime, hopefully you have the intent of using that to prevent and deter future crimes, and if you end up treating a school shooting like a bar fight or vice versa, you’re not gonna get the results you want. The victims conditions are not the reason for crime statistics, I doubt it matters much what the victims were thinking when it comes to preventing future perps.
Most people don’t give a fuck about your definition.
I’d wager most people hear “mass shooting” and think it’s some guy at a school or a mall with an AR-15 and that’s absolutely not what’s happening.
That’s a pretty big and unsubstantiated assumption, though?
One good unsubstantiated assumption deserves another. :)
That’s a pretty big and unsubstantiated assumption, though?
I don’t give a fuck what you’d wager?
Because someone out there is trying desperately to manipulate public opinion. I’m encouraging you to see what they’re doing here.
Real good definition there. /s
Yea, that is a much better representation. These big made up numbers they share are just designed to make people fearful, and underestimate how safe we actually are.
From the Wikipedia article:
I’m not sure I understand why intent matters (barring accidents, I suppose)?
Who cares what the intent was if guns were involved and people were hurt or died?
If a person is suffering from schizophrenia and thinks they are holding a magic wand, but actually shoot up a mall, they don’t have intent but the gun violence still resulted in death. Would that not be a mass shooting in your intent-based definition?
It can see two reasons why it matters.
Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.
These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?
What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.
You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.
No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.
This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!
Do you feel the same way about war?
Intent matters because in a true mass shooting event, the mass shooting is the intent.
In an argument turned into a fight with multiple shooters, nobody went out that day looking to shoot people. It turned out that way, but that wasn’t their goal when they left the house.
Your explaining the difference but not explaining why it makes a difference.
To matters of gun regulation, of safety in public spaces, of trauma to the affected, of national reputation (pick any one, or all, or something else) why does the intent change anything?
I’ll start off: To have the intention to mass-murder purely for the sake of mass murder could be worth isolating and studying because that is a specific and extreme psychological problem worth solving. However, not all mass killings (with intent, for your sake) will have that psychological trigger at root. A religious or racial extremist, for example, is different than a disaffected teenager.
In this circumstance, intent is interesting if one is interested in those other things (psychological issues in American youth, the spread of religious and racial extremism), but ultimately are secondary issues when it comes to measuring gun violence. A mass stabbing by a racial extremist, or a teenager blowing up their high school with fertilizer would still need to be measured.
You are complaining about this organization’s yardstick, but I don’t hear a compelling alternative from you for this specific measure. You are saying they should be measuring a totally different thing, which is arguably irrelevant to this measure.
It’s like explaining the dufference between murder and manslaughter, it’s the degree of the crime that counts.
If you accept that there is a difference between shooting people as a crime of passion, and shooting people by a systemic hunting of other human beings, there doesn’t need to be a “but why is it different?”
It’s different because one, anyone could fall victim to given enough alcohol and anger, and the other requires someone to be fundamentally broken as a human being.
Are you saying that we should have Allowlists vs. Denylists for types of gun violence that are acceptable? This seems to be the fundamental premise upon which we disagree…
From my POV, intention is immaterial because there are no ‘good’ gun deaths, so splitting hairs has no values.
It sounds to me like you’re saying if you go to a mall and have a mass shooting in a totally sober state, that’s bad, but if you get hopped up on bath salts and then have a good old fashioned shotgun rampage, that’s ok and we shouldn’t count those ones…
I’m saying that the phrase “mass shooting” should only be applied to a situation where the shooting is the reason for the conflict, not an argument, robbery, drug crime, or gang crime.
Further, I’d argue that conflating them all together so you can pump up statistics and make people scared denigrates all the victions of actual mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook.
… Why are you saying and arguing those things, nobody cares about what you think about the way the statistics are counted when you can compare the data to other countries without guns and without any types of shooting events, mass or not.
Do you not understand what all of these different people are trying to explain to you?
Because all the countries with strict gun laws that you all love to try and compare the USA with, also have strong social safety nets and are not as diverse as the USA…why don’t you compare it with say Mexico or Brazil? Both have super strong gun laws but have no real safety nets and surprise…still have tons of firearm related deaths.
Sure, and all these different people haven’t said a single thing that counters what I’m saying, telling, isn’t it?
You have described a preventable mass shooting.
Gun violence is gun violence.
“Durrrr but actually…”
No.
I would hope that most mass shootings are preventable given the appropriate analysis.
An example I like to use is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had a prior arrest on a felony gun charge, pled down to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, cleared his background, bought a gun and shot up the place.
So prevention?
How about we make it so that, when it comes to gun charges, there are no plea deals. If he had been a convicted felon, he would not have passed the background check.
Failing that, how about we make gun convictions, felony or misdemeanor, be a blocker for future gun ownership. He already proved he wasn’t a responsible gun owner.
This isn’t about banning guns, this is about controlling what goes on to a background check.
Wacky, right?
“Get rid of prosecutorial and judicial discretion and force people into prison regardless of anything.”
Brilliant. /s
It was ubiquity and easy access to guns in the first place that made mass murder an option in his mind.
Getting rid of access to guns will not happen because of the 2nd amendment. Changing prosecutorial discretion when it comes to gun charges would be far easier.
Even if the 2nd disappeared today, there are 450+ million firearms in civ hands… criminals will not be the ones turning them in.
Oh, most definitely. Typically in threads like this someone pulls the “Buh, buh, Australia…” card without realizing the scale of the problem.
In '96/'97 Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. It was about 20% of all available guns in the country:
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback
Here’s an estimate of 494 million guns in the US:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/
20% of 494 million is 98,800,000. So we would have to run the equivalent of the Australian program 152 times (!) to have the same level of impact.
On top of that, we don’t have the facilities to collect and destroy weapons on that scale. We don’t have the personnel or the disposal space, and the track record we DO have on gun confiscations, well, it’s less than stellar:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/us/guns-disposal-recycling.html
“Hundreds of towns and cities have turned to a growing industry that offers to destroy guns used in crimes, surrendered in buybacks or replaced by police force upgrades. But these communities are in fact fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required, according to interviews and a review of gun disposal contracts, patent records and online listings for firearms parts.”
Yep, Australia had less guns in civ hands that most states that have strong gun laws. It’s a joke when people try and act like a buy back would work…and if it’s a forced one, well good luck finding the law enforcement to go do that and be willing to do so.
“Hey, let’s go door to door looking for armed people so we can take their guns! What could possibly go wrong??!?!”
You ready to do comparisons to other developed countries yet or what?
Sure, give me another developed country with the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment.
Huh… It’s almost as if that’s part of the problem.
Why lol?
Apples to Apples. You can’t compare what happens in other countries to what happens in the US, first because we have the 2nd Amendment and second, because we don’t have universal health care. :(
Oh, right good call, I guess we just have to complain about the way they count the bodies on the internet instead of actually trying to do anything about the thousands of dead children on the hands of the American people and politicians. Totally good call lol.
Compare Mexico and Brazil to the USA both have super strict gun laws but lack safety nets for their citizens…
Those are the 2 countries that you wanna be lumped in with?
No safety nets for their citizens, but strong gun control… again more like the US policies than the EU.
The post soecifically is about counting shootings and not proposing solutions, if you want to talk solutions I do have some good ideas about that too.
First, people need to get it out of their heads that banning guns is the answer. It can’t be done because of the 2nd Amendment, and changing the 2nd Amendment is a political impossibility. You have to start by getting 290 votes in the House, the same body who needed 15 tries to get a simple 218 vote majority to pick their own leader. 290 on guns is out of reach.
So what DO we do? Well, how about a root cause analysis of each shooting? Let’s determine what systemic failures allowed each shooting to happen and make corrections so it doesn’t happen again.
Like that guy in Maine - Police knew FOR MONTHS that he was a potential danger. The military had warned them. He had psych evals backing it up. The cops decided he was too dangerous to engage with and did nothing. Even though Maine has a yellow flag law for weapon confiscation.
Apparently too dangerous to engage with so they just let him walk around in public? 🤔 Well, there’s your problem.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/authorities-knew-maine-shooter-was-a-threat-but-felt-confronting-him-was-unsafe-video-shows/
Shooting after shooting we find these people weren’t unknown to authorities, their lives were filled with more red flags than a May Day Parade, but nothing was done.
Right, changing a law is impossible, and looking at other country’s examples is impossible because Americans are all born with itchy trigger fingers lol.
Given our current divisions? Yes, changing the law is impossible. We saw what it takes to get 290 Congressmen to agree… George Santos. You’ll never get a vote like that on guns, or any other hot button issue, abortion, Supreme Court size, term limits… none of it. It’s a non-starter.
Thanks, i was trying to wrap my head around exactly that:
650 times did someone show up at any kind of gathering and start shooting?
Most of the time it’s an alcohol fueled fight that gets out of hand. People were carrying, but they didn’t go out that day INTENDING to shoot somebody.
That differentiates a school/workplace shooting from other sorts of crimes.
You can check out their mass shooting list here:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
They’re good about citing their sources so you can make up your own mind.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/12/26/deputies-identify-victim-of-deadly-shooting-that-injured-4-others-in-lockhart/
“Investigators believe the shooting was targeted and were said to still be “sorting out” whether any of the people who were shot are suspects in the case at the time of this report, as well as if anyone is outstanding, according to the sheriff’s office.”
Sounds like a gang shooting, but probably too soon to tell.
https://abc13.com/se-houston-shooting-glenvista-street-fatal-person-kille-on-st-nawlims-after-dark/14220801/
“Shooting spurs from altercation outside SE Houston club”
Bar fight.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-respond-report-shots-fired-colorado-springs-mall-christmas-eve
“At the scene, police determined that the shooting was the result of a fight between two groups of people.”
But when you phrase it as “mass shooting” the media repeats it breathlessly and unquestioningly. “OMG! THREE MASS SHOOTINGS ON CHRISTMAS EVE ALONE! Will nobody think of the baby Jesus???”
“If it’s not from the Massshootington region, it’s just sparkling gang violence.”
No. Mass shooting invokes an image of multiple people being shot.
Not in the minds of the public hearing the words “More mass shootings than days in the year.”
But today is a unique opportunity, gun violence archive is claiming the first mass shooting of the year in downtown Los Angeles:
https://abc7.com/downtown-la-fatal-shooting-new-years-lapd/14254758/
“LAPD says the victims were attending a New Year’s Eve celebration at an underground party located in the 2300 block of Porter Street when a fight broke out between several people resulting in a shooting.”
Another alcohol/drug fueled argument escalating into a shooting. Not a random event.
This reminds me of the court room scene in Idiocracy where our man is making a logical argument in an intelligent manner and the lawyers, judges and jury are all too fucking stupid to understand “pssssh just look at em!” followed by laughter.
You guys don’t have to agree with the post but if you’re downvoting someone for adding to the discussion, you are fucking up the moderation system.
Edit to add: The moderation system isn’t for rating users or their percieved intellegence. This is going to turn into reddit all over again. Is that what you want?
I found the point totally irrelevant.
The point makes sense, but so what? A drug deal gone wrong may be properly considered a mass shooting. Either way, it’s gun violence.
Removed by mod
It’s cool, I’m getting to be downvote proof. :)
Engagements like this have actually made me think about my positions and further refine them. I’m at a point where I could actually write a book about it. I should get on that one of these days.
And humble, too!
His ego is bigger than his 60yo belly