No, a shooting at a school would most likely be a mass shooting, unless it were something like a gang shooting, or a robbery, or some fight that got out of control.
I’m talking about the Gun Violence Archive posting up stories like this:
Which, regardless of how many people died, is a murder/suicide, not a mass shooting. The general public was not at risk, the killings weren’t random, and did not happen in a public space. In fact, based on the early reporting, may not have even been a shooting.
There is no widely-accepted definition of “mass shooting” and different organizations tracking such incidents use different definitions. Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare and sometimes exclude instances of gang violence, armed robberies, familicides and terrorism.
Maybe it has something to do with it not being any kind of official term and your panties are twisted over how the media writes them up ignoring the pain and suffering from others and building your strawman off semantics?
“nearly a thousand mass shootings to have taken place since the Newtown shooting in 2009”
Newtown is the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. So when they conflate those two things in the same sentence they want you to believe that there have been nearly 1000 shootings as horrific, deadly, senseless and random as the one that claimed the lives of 20 six and seven year olds, and that is absolutely, patently, false.
No, I’m saying it’s not the same class of crime and the only reason the media conflates them is to scare people.
I’ll give you an example from my own back yard… one of those “thousand mass shootings since Newtown” was this one:
A couple of brothers in Portland decided to do an illegal weed operation. Oregon allows you to grow, own, smoke, sell, and buy weed, but only for in state use.
3 guys fly in from Texas for the illegal weed buy. Words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers shot and killed, 2/3 Texans shot and killed, 3rd Texan arrested sometime later.
That is just normal crime. That’s not a mass shooting in the same way Sandy Hook was and to breath it in the same breath as Sandy Hook disresepects each of the 20 kids that died there.
Gun Violence Archive? 4 people dead = “mass shooting”. No, robbery gone wrong? Sure. Crime? Absolutely. Save the mass shooting shit for when innocent people get killed.
Read very carefully please. It doesn’t matter what people call it, children dying to gun violence at school should not be happening, one per incident or 50 per incident is irrelevant, and the only difference between the US and first world nations where it doesn’t happen is our gun culture.
You have no idea how badly you’ve outed yourself as living in a little bubble where you think it will never happen to you, so you don’t care.
Because you’ll never be in a relationship with a domestic abuser that executes a house full of people will you? You’re the gun owning male, so you get to decide who around you lives or dies.
4 innocent people were killed – a number that is much more difficult to achieve without a gun – but you don’t want them counted because they knew the gun owner.
You’ve let the gun lobby turn you into a fucking sociopath.
That doesn’t make a murder/suicide a “mass shooting”. I’m sorry apporoaching this rationally has you so upset
Thanks, I love this reply. It’s only two sentences, but its so fantastically revealing.
The first sentences calls your very own example a “murder/suicide”, a term which is unquestionably more misleading than “mass shooting”. The “murder” isn’t even plural, despite there being 4 of them.
If you gathered up a million people, told half of them it was a murder/suicide and half of them it was a mass shooting, then asked them to guess the number of people killed, the latter would easily be closer to the truth.
The second sentence just makes it clear you’re a fuckstain.
This isn’t high school debate class. Ad hominem means you’re not inherently wrong just because you’re a fuckwit. You can still be wrong and you can still be a fuckwit.
I don’t really understand why it fucking matters. It is literally the number one cause of death among young people in this country. This happens nowhere else in the modern world. It’s unacceptable.
Stop trying to make the conversation about semantics
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda.
When you read a headline talking about the UNLV shooting and they go “more mass shootings than days in the year!” they are NOT talking about a random nut with a gun showing up in a public place and killing random people like the UNLV shooter.
It’s disingenuous to conflate the two together, and I’d argue, disrespectful of the victims of actual mass shootings.
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda
Bullshit. You’re attacking it because it’s counter to your agenda.
Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.
Not only do you not care when they do it, you’ve enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.
You’re hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.
My agenda is “words mean things” and if you’re going to throw around a phrase like “mass shooting” you shouldn’t have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there’s an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are “mass shootings” and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can’t say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn’t be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can’t say the same for scenario #2.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you’re rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you’re being.
They aren’t being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they’re doing. By the end of January I expect you’ll be stunned at the number of “mass shootings” that aren’t what they’re trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn’t alone in this:
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
You know what would be a pretty interesting way to look at this would be?
Lets take every modern nation in the world (we can bicker about what “modern” means later), and lets create a database similar to the one you’re taking issue with for each of those nations.
We can be just as uncharitable (or is it charitable?) in our definition of “mass shooting”… The exact issue you’re having here right? You think that these statistics unfairly show the US in a negative light.
Well how about we take a look, by that same criteria, how many “mass shootings” these other nations have. Hell, we can even do it per-capita.
I really don’t care what other countries are or are not doing, the fact of the matter is other countries a) don’t have a 2nd amendment and b) have universal health care, it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
What I’m saying is, within the United States alone, there are organizations with a vested interest in making people afraid that they’re going to get shot when the actual risk is extremely low.
No, a shooting at a school would most likely be a mass shooting, unless it were something like a gang shooting, or a robbery, or some fight that got out of control.
I’m talking about the Gun Violence Archive posting up stories like this:
https://www.koin.com/local/clark-county/vancouver-murder-suicide-suspect-victims-identified-by-clark-county-authorities/
Which, regardless of how many people died, is a murder/suicide, not a mass shooting. The general public was not at risk, the killings weren’t random, and did not happen in a public space. In fact, based on the early reporting, may not have even been a shooting.
Maybe it has something to do with it not being any kind of official term and your panties are twisted over how the media writes them up ignoring the pain and suffering from others and building your strawman off semantics?
It’s not that the media writes it up in such sensationalist terms, “if it bleeds, it leads” has been journalism 101 since… well since forever.
My beef is the unquestioning repetition. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/campus-shooting-2
“nearly a thousand mass shootings to have taken place since the Newtown shooting in 2009”
Newtown is the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. So when they conflate those two things in the same sentence they want you to believe that there have been nearly 1000 shootings as horrific, deadly, senseless and random as the one that claimed the lives of 20 six and seven year olds, and that is absolutely, patently, false.
Why are you like this? So since every mass shooting isn’t worse than the worst one they don’t matter? Stop making up excuses. I’m don’t with you.
No, I’m saying it’s not the same class of crime and the only reason the media conflates them is to scare people.
I’ll give you an example from my own back yard… one of those “thousand mass shootings since Newtown” was this one:
A couple of brothers in Portland decided to do an illegal weed operation. Oregon allows you to grow, own, smoke, sell, and buy weed, but only for in state use.
3 guys fly in from Texas for the illegal weed buy. Words were had, guns were drawn, both brothers shot and killed, 2/3 Texans shot and killed, 3rd Texan arrested sometime later.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2021/06/two-portland-brothers-two-marijuana-buyers-die-in-gun-battle-during-attempted-drug-ripoff.html
That is just normal crime. That’s not a mass shooting in the same way Sandy Hook was and to breath it in the same breath as Sandy Hook disresepects each of the 20 kids that died there.
Gun Violence Archive? 4 people dead = “mass shooting”. No, robbery gone wrong? Sure. Crime? Absolutely. Save the mass shooting shit for when innocent people get killed.
Read very carefully please. It doesn’t matter what people call it, children dying to gun violence at school should not be happening, one per incident or 50 per incident is irrelevant, and the only difference between the US and first world nations where it doesn’t happen is our gun culture.
Oh, agreed, which makes it WORSE when they are conflated in the “more mass shootings than days of the year” bullshit.
You have no idea how badly you’ve outed yourself as living in a little bubble where you think it will never happen to you, so you don’t care.
Because you’ll never be in a relationship with a domestic abuser that executes a house full of people will you? You’re the gun owning male, so you get to decide who around you lives or dies.
4 innocent people were killed – a number that is much more difficult to achieve without a gun – but you don’t want them counted because they knew the gun owner.
You’ve let the gun lobby turn you into a fucking sociopath.
That doesn’t make a murder/suicide a “mass shooting”. I’m sorry apporoaching this rationally has you so upset.
Thanks, I love this reply. It’s only two sentences, but its so fantastically revealing.
The first sentences calls your very own example a “murder/suicide”, a term which is unquestionably more misleading than “mass shooting”. The “murder” isn’t even plural, despite there being 4 of them.
If you gathered up a million people, told half of them it was a murder/suicide and half of them it was a mass shooting, then asked them to guess the number of people killed, the latter would easily be closer to the truth.
The second sentence just makes it clear you’re a fuckstain.
And resorting to ad hominem attacks proves you have nothing to actually say on the topic. Congratulations, you lose.
This isn’t high school debate class. Ad hominem means you’re not inherently wrong just because you’re a fuckwit. You can still be wrong and you can still be a fuckwit.
I don’t really understand why it fucking matters. It is literally the number one cause of death among young people in this country. This happens nowhere else in the modern world. It’s unacceptable.
Stop trying to make the conversation about semantics
It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda.
When you read a headline talking about the UNLV shooting and they go “more mass shootings than days in the year!” they are NOT talking about a random nut with a gun showing up in a public place and killing random people like the UNLV shooter.
It’s disingenuous to conflate the two together, and I’d argue, disrespectful of the victims of actual mass shootings.
Bullshit. You’re attacking it because it’s counter to your agenda.
Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.
Not only do you not care when they do it, you’ve enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.
You’re hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.
My agenda is “words mean things” and if you’re going to throw around a phrase like “mass shooting” you shouldn’t have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there’s an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are “mass shootings” and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can’t say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn’t be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you’re rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you’re being.
I’m sorry if that hurts your guns feelings.
They aren’t being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they’re doing. By the end of January I expect you’ll be stunned at the number of “mass shootings” that aren’t what they’re trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn’t alone in this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
You know what would be a pretty interesting way to look at this would be?
Lets take every modern nation in the world (we can bicker about what “modern” means later), and lets create a database similar to the one you’re taking issue with for each of those nations.
We can be just as uncharitable (or is it charitable?) in our definition of “mass shooting”… The exact issue you’re having here right? You think that these statistics unfairly show the US in a negative light.
Well how about we take a look, by that same criteria, how many “mass shootings” these other nations have. Hell, we can even do it per-capita.
How do you think that would look?
I really don’t care what other countries are or are not doing, the fact of the matter is other countries a) don’t have a 2nd amendment and b) have universal health care, it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
What I’m saying is, within the United States alone, there are organizations with a vested interest in making people afraid that they’re going to get shot when the actual risk is extremely low.