Conquer Club

Symmetry wrote: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

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

Phatscotty wrote: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.

mrswdk wrote:

Phatscotty wrote: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?'

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.

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.

Symmetry wrote: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 wrote:

Symmetry wrote: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.