"There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows
The United States has experienced 627 mass shootings so far this year."
The problem is they define “mass shooting” differently from how the public sees a mass shooting.
Their definition is a shooting event where 4 or more people are injured or killed.
So were there 627 events similar to the UNLV situation where a nut with a gun shows up in a public place and starts shooting indescriminately?
No.
Most of the shootings listed on the Gun Violence Archive are situations where there was a party, alcohol or drugs were involved, two parties got into an argument, the argument turned into a fight, and people got shot. That’s not how most people define a “mass shooting”.
I’d argue for a mass shooting definition of “person(s) arrive at a public location with the sole intention of shooting as many people as possible.”
That would rule out the bar fight incidents, or robberies gone bad, or people who go nuts and kill their family in their own house. We should distinguish between psychotic episodes that put the public at risk, vs. normal crime, vs. domestic vioence that does not involve the general public.
They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don’t need to ask why, it’s because gun sales bring in millions in profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.
I didn’t claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.
Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?
That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.
Meanwhile in America, they don’t bother to ask those questions.
They had a gun because it’s trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can’t pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.
The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.
No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado – much the same as you’re doing right now.
Limiting the damage isn’t just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.
These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn’t bother to pretend they cared.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against sensible legislation, there are many things that can and should be done starting with an actual analysis if what could or should have prevented any specific shooting, once you realize that “banning guns” is off the table thanks to the second amendment.
An example I like to cite is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had previously been arrested on a felony gun charge, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, had a clean background check, bought guns and shot up the school.
Now, we already prevent felons from owning guns. Maybe, just maybe, if someone is arrested on a felony gun charge, that is something that should not be allowed to be pled down to a misdemeanor? Ya think?
Alternately, since we block felons from owning guns, as well as domestic abusers, and people charged with crimes that can land them in prison for more than a year, how about we block people with ANY gun charge from owning a gun? Felony OR misdemeanor? They’ve already proven they can’t be trusted with a gun.
These are the sorts of conversations we need to have but aren’t having because people get so caught up in knee jerk actions that can’t be taken.
I remember years ago the call was for “common sense gun reform!” and the action was “Did you know, people on the no-fly list can buy guns? How is that common sense??!??” Obama was making that call.
To which my reaction was “How many of these shooters were on the no-fly list? Oh, right, NONE of them? Good jorb!”
And there’s no set process for adding or removing people from the no fly list and it, itself, appears to be non-sensical:
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.
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.
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.
54% of those were suicides. So 22,462 murders or accidents.
Gun laws are never going to prevent suicides, only national mental health care can do that. So looking at the murders and accidents:
22,462 / 474,000,000? 0.0000473878
That’s not a crisis, it’s a rounding error. And, yes, each one of those 22,000 deaths individually is a tragedy, but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust.
but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust.
Nah, many were used for hunting, self defense that didn’t lead to a death, sport shooting, target practice… Etc… Likely orders of magnitude higher than the amount used to commit murders.
Not necessarily, it could be used for hunting, or target practice, but any gun that isn’t actively being used is, yeah, kind of just sitting around somewhere.
Oh, I absolutely get it, what folks outside the US don’t get is the 2nd amendment isn’t going anywhere.
To repeal it, you first have to get 290 votes in the House, which is largely insurmountable. It took George Santos to get that many Congressmen to agree on something.
Then you need 67 votes in the Senate, the body that can’t get past 60 to disable a filibuster.
Assuming, miracle of miracles, that happens, then you need ratification by 38 states.
Biden only won 25, and of those only 19 have Democratic statehouses. You’d need 19 red states to be on board with giving up guns, assuming you didn’t lose any blue states.
No. It just takes some basic intelligence to figure out that mass shootings are shootings of multiple people. Sorry that concept is hard for you to understand.
There is, fundamentally, a difference between a crime that, when reported, makes your average citizen go “OMG! That could have been me!” vs. a crime which, while tragic, does not endanger the general public or people at random.
“Mass shooting” carries with it a sense of reckless disregard or casual indifference that does NOT apply to, say, crimes of passion.
Gun Violence Archive treats that as a mass shooting. Unless you lived next door to the shooter in question, you were never at risk. The shooting was not random, and it did not happen in a public space.
So why do they categorize it as the same sort of crime as the UNLV shooting? Which was random and did take place in a public space?
Because they have an agenda and want to pump up their numbers.
Ummm…why would you not consider that a mass shooting? Do you not have neighbors? It kind of seems like that really could be anybody considering many people have at least one unhinged neighbor around them.
A mass shooting happens in a public place with random targets, making your average person feel victimized even if they weren’t there. It’s an act of terror, the murder is ancillary.
In the case of a targeted killing at a private home? That’s just murder.
Where does your definition come from? I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just not the same as what I and people I know use. For context, I live in the US.
Well that’s nice that you made up your own definition…
Your distinction can make sense but not how you are looking at it. Saying murder is ancillary is ridiculous. The killers in those cases are not just wildly shooting in the air and it just so happens to hit people and kill them. Killing them is their intent. You could make an argument to split our random mass shootings vs targeted but there is still a pretty obvious base reason for both of those: ease of access to guns.
Of course, it doesn’t do any good to say “their definition is bullshit” if I’m not willing to provide an alternative.
We need to distinguish terrorist level events where one or more nuts with a gun enter a public space with the intention of causing as much mayhem as possible than other forms of gun crimes where armed people do end up shooting, but that was not their stated purpose, it just worked out that way.
There’s an issue with Familicides as well. Those are often in private, but can wipe a household out. Ease of access is what is being discussed largely, as well as the general terrorism of a ‘public space’ mass shooting.
The worst is the Gun Violence Archive and their “mass shooting index” which gets quoted uncritically in the media, so you get headlines like:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shootings-days-2023-database-shows/story?id=96609874
"There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows
The United States has experienced 627 mass shootings so far this year."
The problem is they define “mass shooting” differently from how the public sees a mass shooting.
Their definition is a shooting event where 4 or more people are injured or killed.
So were there 627 events similar to the UNLV situation where a nut with a gun shows up in a public place and starts shooting indescriminately?
No.
Most of the shootings listed on the Gun Violence Archive are situations where there was a party, alcohol or drugs were involved, two parties got into an argument, the argument turned into a fight, and people got shot. That’s not how most people define a “mass shooting”.
I’d argue for a mass shooting definition of “person(s) arrive at a public location with the sole intention of shooting as many people as possible.”
That would rule out the bar fight incidents, or robberies gone bad, or people who go nuts and kill their family in their own house. We should distinguish between psychotic episodes that put the public at risk, vs. normal crime, vs. domestic vioence that does not involve the general public.
So your objection is that they call a mass shooting a mass shooting? What magic number would you like them to use?
No, my objection is they call normal shootings mass shootings with the agenda of making and keeping people scared.
“Normal shootings”
You just made me realize how much I’d love to live in a country where there was no such thing as a “normal shooting”.
Gun culture in America is absolutely fucked.
While it’s not quite “throw a dart board at a map”, it’s pretty close.
They’re so goddamn brain rotted that they don’t even realize how completely fucked that is.
Yes, for example:
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/at-least-3-fatally-shot-in-dallas-home-suspect-wanted/
That’s just “crime”, not a mass shooting, unless you talk to the gun violence archive.
They want you to be scared. You need to ask why.
The “normal” number of people getting shot is 0.
They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don’t need to ask why, it’s because gun sales bring in millions in profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.
Unfortunately, no, that’s never going to happen. Even in countries that severely limit guns, the number is not 0.
Just this year in England for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_shooting
Or Germany:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamburg_shooting
Last year in Australia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieambilla_shootings
It is not and never will be 0.
I didn’t claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.
Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?
That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.
Meanwhile in America, they don’t bother to ask those questions.
They had a gun because it’s trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can’t pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.
The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.
No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado – much the same as you’re doing right now.
Limiting the damage isn’t just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.
These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn’t bother to pretend they cared.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against sensible legislation, there are many things that can and should be done starting with an actual analysis if what could or should have prevented any specific shooting, once you realize that “banning guns” is off the table thanks to the second amendment.
An example I like to cite is the guy who shot up Michigan State. He had previously been arrested on a felony gun charge, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, did his time, did his probation, had a clean background check, bought guns and shot up the school.
Now, we already prevent felons from owning guns. Maybe, just maybe, if someone is arrested on a felony gun charge, that is something that should not be allowed to be pled down to a misdemeanor? Ya think?
Alternately, since we block felons from owning guns, as well as domestic abusers, and people charged with crimes that can land them in prison for more than a year, how about we block people with ANY gun charge from owning a gun? Felony OR misdemeanor? They’ve already proven they can’t be trusted with a gun.
These are the sorts of conversations we need to have but aren’t having because people get so caught up in knee jerk actions that can’t be taken.
I remember years ago the call was for “common sense gun reform!” and the action was “Did you know, people on the no-fly list can buy guns? How is that common sense??!??” Obama was making that call.
To which my reaction was “How many of these shooters were on the no-fly list? Oh, right, NONE of them? Good jorb!”
And there’s no set process for adding or removing people from the no fly list and it, itself, appears to be non-sensical:
https://www.aclu.org/documents/statement-david-c-nelson
So you’ll only care about children dying in school when the numbers go up even higher than they already are?
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.
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.
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.
You don’t think the nra telling people to be scared and that they need a gun to feel safe is more of the issue?
Not really, because the vast, vast, number of gun owners don’t use them.
Let me give you some perspective…
We don’t REALLY know, but the best estimate is there are around 474 MILLION guns in the United States.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/
In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun injuries.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
54% of those were suicides. So 22,462 murders or accidents.
Gun laws are never going to prevent suicides, only national mental health care can do that. So looking at the murders and accidents:
22,462 / 474,000,000? 0.0000473878
That’s not a crisis, it’s a rounding error. And, yes, each one of those 22,000 deaths individually is a tragedy, but that also means 473,978,000 guns sat around collecting dust.
Nah, many were used for hunting, self defense that didn’t lead to a death, sport shooting, target practice… Etc… Likely orders of magnitude higher than the amount used to commit murders.
So if a gun isn’t being used to kill someone it is collecng dust?
Not necessarily, it could be used for hunting, or target practice, but any gun that isn’t actively being used is, yeah, kind of just sitting around somewhere.
Jesus christ… Let’s compare to other developed nations, wanna do per capita or total?
Other countries don’t have a 2nd Amendment. Not the same thing.
You’re so close to getting it.
Oh, I absolutely get it, what folks outside the US don’t get is the 2nd amendment isn’t going anywhere.
To repeal it, you first have to get 290 votes in the House, which is largely insurmountable. It took George Santos to get that many Congressmen to agree on something.
Then you need 67 votes in the Senate, the body that can’t get past 60 to disable a filibuster.
Assuming, miracle of miracles, that happens, then you need ratification by 38 states.
Biden only won 25, and of those only 19 have Democratic statehouses. You’d need 19 red states to be on board with giving up guns, assuming you didn’t lose any blue states.
So, yeah, Good Luck!
You’re right, you guys have the right to shoot yourselves and each other. Carry on.
That’s is I and many others define it…
If you want to scare people, sure, you can define it that way.
No. It just takes some basic intelligence to figure out that mass shootings are shootings of multiple people. Sorry that concept is hard for you to understand.
There is, fundamentally, a difference between a crime that, when reported, makes your average citizen go “OMG! That could have been me!” vs. a crime which, while tragic, does not endanger the general public or people at random.
“Mass shooting” carries with it a sense of reckless disregard or casual indifference that does NOT apply to, say, crimes of passion.
For example:
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/at-least-3-fatally-shot-in-dallas-home-suspect-wanted/
Gun Violence Archive treats that as a mass shooting. Unless you lived next door to the shooter in question, you were never at risk. The shooting was not random, and it did not happen in a public space.
So why do they categorize it as the same sort of crime as the UNLV shooting? Which was random and did take place in a public space?
Because they have an agenda and want to pump up their numbers.
Ummm…why would you not consider that a mass shooting? Do you not have neighbors? It kind of seems like that really could be anybody considering many people have at least one unhinged neighbor around them.
A mass shooting happens in a public place with random targets, making your average person feel victimized even if they weren’t there. It’s an act of terror, the murder is ancillary.
In the case of a targeted killing at a private home? That’s just murder.
Where does your definition come from? I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just not the same as what I and people I know use. For context, I live in the US.
Definition comes from a position of rationality and not wanting to scare people. :)
Well that’s nice that you made up your own definition…
Your distinction can make sense but not how you are looking at it. Saying murder is ancillary is ridiculous. The killers in those cases are not just wildly shooting in the air and it just so happens to hit people and kill them. Killing them is their intent. You could make an argument to split our random mass shootings vs targeted but there is still a pretty obvious base reason for both of those: ease of access to guns.
Of course, it doesn’t do any good to say “their definition is bullshit” if I’m not willing to provide an alternative.
We need to distinguish terrorist level events where one or more nuts with a gun enter a public space with the intention of causing as much mayhem as possible than other forms of gun crimes where armed people do end up shooting, but that was not their stated purpose, it just worked out that way.
Sad to see this so heavily down voted. A ton of emotional reasoning from people in this thread rather than by logic.
A gang shooting, police shooting, robbery, self defense etc are not mass shootings. Period. Its dishonesty to include those statistics.
Or even simple bar fights. How long have we been having bar fights in this country? If you include those then this is absolutely nothing new.
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There’s an issue with Familicides as well. Those are often in private, but can wipe a household out. Ease of access is what is being discussed largely, as well as the general terrorism of a ‘public space’ mass shooting.