General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?
On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year. Vox, MSNBCs Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four mass shootings this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
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 cant know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html
ProudToBeBlueInRhody
(16,399 posts)Some guy goes and shoots his whole family and himself used to be major news.....
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)I can see why the number of people shot matters a lot, and arguably the number of people who shoot people matters a bit.
But I'm not convinced that the breakdown into "mass" and "non-mass" shootings is much more than semantics. 100 people killed in 100 individual shootings matter just as much as 100 people killed by one gunman.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)And that really matters because it directly influences American awareness and attitudes and thereby calls for political action
It also matters to the purpose of your counting. If you want large numbers you want a broad definition that is more inclusive, it you want to know about specific types of attacks then you want the counting to be done by tighter definitions. Large numbers have great statistical power and also greater political influence.
CBGLuthier
(12,723 posts)As to the different types of event, I know the one thing they all have in common. Motherfucking guns used by motherfuckers.
brush
(53,784 posts)And even 2 killed and several wounded, IMO, is a mass shooting.
The term "mass shooting" seems a more realistic, honest term to describe our horrible new reality than just "mass killing" which has to include 4 or more dead.
It's too easy to ignore the others with less than 4 dead if we use an arbitrary threshold of kills.
Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-have-become-more-common-in-the-u-s/