What's Considered a Mass Shooting?

[DaGip]

Just saw this article on the net today, proclaiming to show all the "mass shootings" that have happened since Sandy Hook.

Although, any amount of life being lost is indeed tragic...I hardly think that 1, 2, 3, or 4 people being shot is considered a "mass shooting".

What about all the hunters from Minnesota that get shot every hunting season? Do they include that as a "mass shooting" too?

I guess any number of people being shot that is greater than one could be technically considered en masse.

A lot of the stats provided are only people being shot, and nobody being killed...or perhaps 1 person being killed and 3 or 4 being shot along with the victim.

When I think en masse like Sandy Hook...I am thinking bigger numbers of people being shot and killed than 1, 2, 3, or 4. I'm thinking about Mall, movie theater, school, factory/work shootings...not usually family/friend disputes like the ones they added for South Dakota. The one in Sisseton was a Sioux kid that was drunk and on drugs and was jealous that a girl he liked was having sex with another guy. So, he flipped out at a small party. The other incident in South Dakota was in Platte, South Dakota where a father was going through divorce, so he decided to murder his whole family, burn down his house, and commit suicide. Yes, technically those are "mass shootings"...but to classify them in the same category as Sandy Hook is a bit misleading.

But I have noticed the majority of shootings happen along the coasts. Maybe instead of getting rid of the guns...we should focus on getting rid of the coasts.

http://www.vox.com/a/mass-shootings-sandy-hook

[/]

I'm pretty sure a "Mass Shooting" is either This or This

[2dimes]

Are they taking intent into consideration? The shooter was going to shoot everyone they could but was then shot themselves after only getting a few shots off.

Thus instead of shooting many people they only shot 1,2,3 or 4.

[Dukasaur]

I agree. A mass is an unrelated group of people, like in a mall or theatre. Icing a family is not a Mass shooting.

[ConfederateSS]

-------I count them by the nature of the scene. The day there was a shooting at an Arizona college. Which I counted. 1)Because it happened on a college campus. Where guns should not be allowed. The person went to his car to get his gun. Came back to inflict damage. He could of just left. There were also shootings at a Texas college. Which was more of a robbery nature. People came from outside the campus limits to rob people. So I didn't count it.
-------There was a shooting at a New Orleans park on the 22nd of Nov.. But that was two groups of people making a music video. Even though 17 people were shot. That's not a mass shooting. There were multiple shooters on both sides.When things got out of hand.They didn't go there to shoot people. More of a gang related type shooting. I didn't count it. When the Colorado Springs shooting took place on Nov.27th. No one had died yet. I counted it. Not because of the number of people killed or shot. But the nature of the shooting. He went there to kill.
-------I will say these shooters that give themselves up or leave. Are ruining the good name of shooter. Come on,where are the all for nothing, you'll never take me alive copper shooters of old. Stop making James Cagney keep turning over in his grave. ConfederateSS.out!(The Blue and Silver Rebellion). ***MADE IT MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!!!!!!!***

[Symmetry]

Five people killed is considered a massacre in terms taught in the American education system, I think. So it would be reasonable that a more moderate term like "mass shooting" be used for four.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre

[Dukasaur]

Five people killed is considered a massacre in terms taught in the American education system, I think. So it would be reasonable that a more moderate term like "mass shooting" be used for four.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre

Nobody was killed in Alice's Restaurant Massacree, so I suspect that the term massacre in American usage simply implies an unusual event.

[Phatscotty]

people are trying to make it seem like a bigger deal than it is. Truth be told, the narrative that 'America has the most gun murders of the universe!....if you remove Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and Detroit, (where the REAL problem of racist white people live) then America would have the fewest gun homicides per capita in the world. So really, the problem can be narrowed down and addressed much more efficiently rather than yelling at the NRA and Republicans all the time. But it seems nobody actually wants to do something about the problem, they just want to exploit the murders for political gain

[ConfederateSS]

people are trying to make it seem like a bigger deal than it is.

-------I know, why would kids want to feel safe when they go outside or to school? That's o.k. though. Thanks to modern technology. They never leave the house anymore. Sitting on their asses all day. 21st century baby! Whew! Everyone stay in your bunkers,and wait for the Asteroid! ConfederateSS.out!(The Blue and Silver Rebellion).

[iAmCaffeine]

[mrswdk]

if you remove Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and Detroit, (where the REAL problem of racist white people live) then America would have the fewest gun homicides per capita in the world. So really, the problem can be narrowed down and addressed much more efficiently rather than yelling at the NRA and Republicans all the time.

Even if all those fairly dubious facts are true, then what's the answer to 'why are gun homicides in those four cities so high?'

[DaGip]

if you remove Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and Detroit, (where the REAL problem of racist white people live) then America would have the fewest gun homicides per capita in the world. So really, the problem can be narrowed down and addressed much more efficiently rather than yelling at the NRA and Republicans all the time.

Even if all those fairly dubious facts are true, then what's the answer to 'why are gun homicides in those four cities so high?'

That is where The Mafia is located.

[Dukasaur]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html?_r=3

What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.

While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.

For at least the past decade, the F.B.I. regarded a mass shooting as a single attack in which four or more victims were killed. (In 2013, a mandate from President Obama for further study of the problem lowered that threshold to three victims killed.) When we began compiling our database in 2012, we used that criteria of four or more killed in public attacks, but excluded mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes. Our goal with this relatively narrow set of parameters was to better understand the seemingly indiscriminate attacks that have increased in recent years, whether in movie theaters, elementary schools or office parks.

The statistics now being highlighted in the news come primarily from shootingtracker.com, a website built by members of a Reddit forum supporting gun control called GunsAreCool. That site aggregates news stories about shooting incidents — of any kind — in which four or more people are reported to have been either injured or killed.

It’s not clear why the Redditors use this much broader criteria. The founder of the “shooting tracker” project, who currently goes by the handle “Billy Speed,” told me it was his choice: “Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ definition of mass shooting.” It’s also not clear how many of those stories — many of them from local outlets, including scant detail — are accurate.

[Metsfanmax]

See also Vox's response to that NYT op-ed: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ ... definition

Follman argues that expanding the definition of mass shootings too much makes it harder to narrow down and research trends for certain kinds of mass shootings that may be on the rise. But I'm not sure why researchers and experts couldn't do that kind of work by just looking at specific events on their own. After all, they're going to have to do that kind of narrowing down anyway — even under Follman's definition, which includes shootings as varied as white supremacists going into predominantly black churches to kill people, religious extremists attacking others at military bases, and workplace massacres.

But as I've written before, this entire debate is ridiculous. A shooting is a shooting. The broader problem is that the US has levels of gun deaths that are far beyond what any other developed country deals with — even though we know that gun control policies could help bring down the number of gun deaths.

[Dukasaur]

Point taken.

[Symmetry]

I think part of it is the fierce competition between news outlets, and how it's processed. One of the most disturbing aspects of one of the most recent school shootings was that the murderer asked his victims if they were Christians.

It sounds like he was copycatting a story that a bunch of churches were promulgating about Columbine. That a girl was asked that question before she was shot. A falsehood becoming reality.

[PLAYER57832]

You guys have all missed it! The truth is a mass killing is whenever the mass media decides a killing is a "mass killing". Period.

[Symmetry]

It is kind of interesting that a soft term like "mass shooting" has become such a common event that people want a new term to differentiate them from other types of shooting sprees.

[mrswdk]

It is kind of interesting that a soft term like "mass shooting" has become such a common event that people want a new term to differentiate them from other types of shooting sprees.

lol

Kinda like how only residents of London in the early 1940s would really be able to tell you the difference between the silhouette of a Junker, Spitfire, Lancaster and Messerschmitt, while to everyone else they're just planes.

[Symmetry]

It is kind of interesting that a soft term like "mass shooting" has become such a common event that people want a new term to differentiate them from other types of shooting sprees.

lol

Kinda like how only residents of London in the early 1940s would really be able to tell you the difference between the silhouette of a Junker, Spitfire, Lancaster and Messerschmitt, while to everyone else they're just planes.

Hmm, perhaps. It does seem to have become a fact of life for Americans. As if the whole gun control argument as a solution is inconceivable.