Quote:
Originally Posted by KootenayFlamesFan
Wait a minute. No offense to you since you're quoting something/someone else, but you need the people to die to consider it a mass shooting? You could shoot 50 people, none die, so it's not a mass shooting? What would you call it?
I think most people would consider 4 or more people killed a mass murder, or mass killing. 4 or more people shot, regardless if they die or not a mass shooting.
If you're only considering people that die a mass shooting that is extremely misleading, to put it mildly.
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FWIW, that’s the study used by the NYT story you linked to. The one where
most mass shootings use legal firearms came from. So yes, most of the 5-8 mass shootings a year under that narrow criteria use legal firearms. Most of the hundreds of other mass shootings do not. Which is important to understand when talking about causes and solutions.
But what’s really misleading is when the media follow up a story about a lunatic gunning down strangers in public with statements like “this was the tenth mass shooting in the U.S. this month,” implying that it was the tenth time in the last month that a lunatic stalked a public space with a rifle gunning down everyone he saw.
Lumping together different crimes with different perpetrators, contexts, means, and motives makes it
harder to actually address an extremely difficult and complex problem.