[Dan02]

Originally Posted by octothorp

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

Why do we have to zero in on just these events? What's wrong with trying to prevent ALL gun crimes?