I’m not sure I understand why intent matters (barring accidents, I suppose)?
Who cares what the intent was if guns were involved and people were hurt or died?
If a person is suffering from schizophrenia and thinks they are holding a magic wand, but actually shoot up a mall, they don’t have intent but the gun violence still resulted in death. Would that not be a mass shooting in your intent-based definition?
Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.
These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?
What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.
You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong.
No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.
You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!
Intent matters because in a true mass shooting event, the mass shooting is the intent.
In an argument turned into a fight with multiple shooters, nobody went out that day looking to shoot people. It turned out that way, but that wasn’t their goal when they left the house.
Your explaining the difference but not explaining why it makes a difference.
To matters of gun regulation, of safety in public spaces, of trauma to the affected, of national reputation (pick any one, or all, or something else) why does the intent change anything?
I’ll start off: To have the intention to mass-murder purely for the sake of mass murder could be worth isolating and studying because that is a specific and extreme psychological problem worth solving. However, not all mass killings (with intent, for your sake) will have that psychological trigger at root. A religious or racial extremist, for example, is different than a disaffected teenager.
In this circumstance, intent is interesting if one is interested in those other things (psychological issues in American youth, the spread of religious and racial extremism), but ultimately are secondary issues when it comes to measuring gun violence. A mass stabbing by a racial extremist, or a teenager blowing up their high school with fertilizer would still need to be measured.
You are complaining about this organization’s yardstick, but I don’t hear a compelling alternative from you for this specific measure. You are saying they should be measuring a totally different thing, which is arguably irrelevant to this measure.
It’s like explaining the dufference between murder and manslaughter, it’s the degree of the crime that counts.
If you accept that there is a difference between shooting people as a crime of passion, and shooting people by a systemic hunting of other human beings, there doesn’t need to be a “but why is it different?”
It’s different because one, anyone could fall victim to given enough alcohol and anger, and the other requires someone to be fundamentally broken as a human being.
Are you saying that we should have Allowlists vs. Denylists for types of gun violence that are acceptable? This seems to be the fundamental premise upon which we disagree…
From my POV, intention is immaterial because there are no ‘good’ gun deaths, so splitting hairs has no values.
It sounds to me like you’re saying if you go to a mall and have a mass shooting in a totally sober state, that’s bad, but if you get hopped up on bath salts and then have a good old fashioned shotgun rampage, that’s ok and we shouldn’t count those ones…
I’m saying that the phrase “mass shooting” should only be applied to a situation where the shooting is the reason for the conflict, not an argument, robbery, drug crime, or gang crime.
Further, I’d argue that conflating them all together so you can pump up statistics and make people scared denigrates all the victions of actual mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook.
… Why are you saying and arguing those things, nobody cares about what you think about the way the statistics are counted when you can compare the data to other countries without guns and without any types of shooting events, mass or not.
Do you not understand what all of these different people are trying to explain to you?
Because all the countries with strict gun laws that you all love to try and compare the USA with, also have strong social safety nets and are not as diverse as the USA…why don’t you compare it with say Mexico or Brazil? Both have super strong gun laws but have no real safety nets and surprise…still have tons of firearm related deaths.
I’m not sure I understand why intent matters (barring accidents, I suppose)?
Who cares what the intent was if guns were involved and people were hurt or died?
If a person is suffering from schizophrenia and thinks they are holding a magic wand, but actually shoot up a mall, they don’t have intent but the gun violence still resulted in death. Would that not be a mass shooting in your intent-based definition?
It can see two reasons why it matters.
Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.
These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?
What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.
You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.
No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.
This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!
Do you feel the same way about war?
Intent matters because in a true mass shooting event, the mass shooting is the intent.
In an argument turned into a fight with multiple shooters, nobody went out that day looking to shoot people. It turned out that way, but that wasn’t their goal when they left the house.
Your explaining the difference but not explaining why it makes a difference.
To matters of gun regulation, of safety in public spaces, of trauma to the affected, of national reputation (pick any one, or all, or something else) why does the intent change anything?
I’ll start off: To have the intention to mass-murder purely for the sake of mass murder could be worth isolating and studying because that is a specific and extreme psychological problem worth solving. However, not all mass killings (with intent, for your sake) will have that psychological trigger at root. A religious or racial extremist, for example, is different than a disaffected teenager.
In this circumstance, intent is interesting if one is interested in those other things (psychological issues in American youth, the spread of religious and racial extremism), but ultimately are secondary issues when it comes to measuring gun violence. A mass stabbing by a racial extremist, or a teenager blowing up their high school with fertilizer would still need to be measured.
You are complaining about this organization’s yardstick, but I don’t hear a compelling alternative from you for this specific measure. You are saying they should be measuring a totally different thing, which is arguably irrelevant to this measure.
It’s like explaining the dufference between murder and manslaughter, it’s the degree of the crime that counts.
If you accept that there is a difference between shooting people as a crime of passion, and shooting people by a systemic hunting of other human beings, there doesn’t need to be a “but why is it different?”
It’s different because one, anyone could fall victim to given enough alcohol and anger, and the other requires someone to be fundamentally broken as a human being.
Are you saying that we should have Allowlists vs. Denylists for types of gun violence that are acceptable? This seems to be the fundamental premise upon which we disagree…
From my POV, intention is immaterial because there are no ‘good’ gun deaths, so splitting hairs has no values.
It sounds to me like you’re saying if you go to a mall and have a mass shooting in a totally sober state, that’s bad, but if you get hopped up on bath salts and then have a good old fashioned shotgun rampage, that’s ok and we shouldn’t count those ones…
I’m saying that the phrase “mass shooting” should only be applied to a situation where the shooting is the reason for the conflict, not an argument, robbery, drug crime, or gang crime.
Further, I’d argue that conflating them all together so you can pump up statistics and make people scared denigrates all the victions of actual mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook.
… Why are you saying and arguing those things, nobody cares about what you think about the way the statistics are counted when you can compare the data to other countries without guns and without any types of shooting events, mass or not.
Do you not understand what all of these different people are trying to explain to you?
Because all the countries with strict gun laws that you all love to try and compare the USA with, also have strong social safety nets and are not as diverse as the USA…why don’t you compare it with say Mexico or Brazil? Both have super strong gun laws but have no real safety nets and surprise…still have tons of firearm related deaths.
Not as diverse as the eu?? Not as diverse as Canada? Wtf are you talking about
Sure, and all these different people haven’t said a single thing that counters what I’m saying, telling, isn’t it?
We’ve all countered it. Very telling indeed.