Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
I feel like I'm arguing a bit on the wrong side here, as I'm actually pro-gun restriction
However, many of the shootings you've cited involve people killing family members and acquaintances. These wouldn't qualify under "public" shootings. IF you're going to start looking at these kinds of murders, you widely broaden the scope of what you're looking at. You've listed multiple homicides, which is also contributed to by lax gun laws, but different than the narrower category of mass public shootings.
|
Yeah, I essentially agree with this. I do think it's meaningful when we're talking about things like assault-weapons bans and such, to look at how someone behaves if they are intending to kill some members of a particular household, vs. going out to try to cause the maximum amount of carnage. That's not to diminish other gun crimes, which obviously account for far more deaths overall than these mass public shootings, but for any meaningful discussion of trying to prevent these events, you need to zero in on the right data so that you can find the correlating factors (of which both possible mental health issues and assault weapons are strong but not universal parts of the equation, while illegally obtaining firearms is not part of the equation), which often become lost if you increase the data to, say, any shooting in which 4 or more people are killed.
I do think that Motherjones has a good approach with their database:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-shootings-map