He posted a manifesto online. Think his motive was pretty clearly outlined in it.
> The Dayton shooter left no manifesto.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/7/20758473/trump-invasion-el-paso...
A manifesto isn't necessarily honest. It describes how shooters want the world to view their actions, not necessarily the actual motives behind their actions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
The average American rarely ever has to directly confront violence. I've even spent years in major metropolitan areas and the majority of people don't walk around each day anticipating violence. My sister got mugged once, in our small home city, like 20 years ago. I've never personally been mugged or assaulted, but I did have one break in while in NZ (they took all my electronics) and I had a bicycle stolen in Australia.
I haven't lived in "bad parts of town" through (although friends told me I lived in a bad part of town in two places I lived in; but I really feel they were exaggerating) and in high crime areas I'm sure it's different.
But the portrayal the rest of the world sees of America is through a very limited lens. And German or Irish or Chinese person who comes to visit the US will see kids playing in parks, people in the cities walking to work or lunch, others browsing through stores or pumping petrol into their cars and it will generally looks pretty much like every other part of the mid/high income industrialized world.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...
But I don't feel like I'm going to get shot in the United States. I have never even heard gunfire in the U.S. (off the shooting range!) and I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_P...
I wouldn't categories that incident along with the two recent "actual" mass shootings.
I cannot find anything disingenous about choosing an official definition and mentioning that it is problematic in the first paragraph.
From the article: Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrators, are shot in one location at roughly the same time.
You probably have another definition in mind, since in your mind "mass shooting" is somehow associated with classic amok runs and terrorism. But how is that a counter-argument to using the official definitions and terms, as they are defined by US congress and used by police and the US judicial system? Why on earth would it be disingenuous for them to base their statistics on the official definitions?
Sure, some people think that e.g. gang-related gun violence shouldn't count as a mass shooting even if many victims are involved, but the US congress chose otherwise and the page makes it crystal clear that the definition is problematic.
Is this your citation for the 2013 US Congress definition? (because I don't think it says what you seem to think it says).
https://www.congress.gov/112/plaws/publ265/PLAW-112publ265.p...
If not, please provide your citation so that I can read it and respond intelligently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions
To quote: " The term was originally defined as the murder of four or more people with no cooling-off period[1][5] but redefined by Congress in 2013 as being murder of three or more people."
Not only that, at the risk of repeating myself, the page you criticize as being "disingenuous" clearly mentions that definitions of "mass shootings" are controversial and provides 5 alternative definitions in the second paragraph of the article and then lists 7 data sources with definitions of "mass shooting" that either coincides with the one by US Congress or is more stringent (based on the pre 2013 definition).
The page also clearly states that "... only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed."
There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about this method.
What you and the people who downvote me cannot get into their minds is that there are official definitions that are used in statistics and that the listing on the Wikipedia page takes a slighly more stringent and narrower definition as a basis to safeguard against criticisms such as yours.
Again, you are of course free to re-define the term "mass shooting" differently from what e.g. the US Congress or Stanford University do, but this would not constitute a valid criticism of the list. How could it? Merely prefering your very personal definition over another one doesn't mean anything, especially if it deviates far from the official use of the term.
Frankly speaking, it's not clear what this thread is about. According to social constructivism, social reality might change by re-defining terms like "mass shooting", but according to my sense of reality the number of victims doesn't change at all. I can also see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't base their lists on the 'most official' terms rather than making up their own, as long as they make clear that this includes multiple homicides by gun, which they do.
Yes. This sub-thread started with someone else arguing that one of the entries on the list of "mass shootings" did not deserve to be on the list.
If the argument is "it must involve deaths to be a mass shooting", that incident also involved zero deaths (and zero innocent civilian injuries).
There is nothing wrong with the list, but there seems to be some metalinguistic dispute about what's the best definition of "mass shooting."
This dispute is merely about words.
For my part, all else being equal, for every N criminal home invaders, the optimal number of home invaders repelled by lawful force without injury to innocent civilians is also exactly N. If you want to mix those relatively rare good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings (the vast majority of them), that's one way to approach things. You could also keep a list of "Things that happened on Tuesdays in history" and it would be a perfectly self-consistent list.
> good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings
I'd certainly say that's better methodology than trying to define "good" and "bad" mass shootings and then only list the "bad" ones. (I don't quite see what's good about this shooting anyway, but I suppose you mean that the crime was stopped.)
Of course, you're less likely to get shot in Europe. If you start cherry picking locations, on the other hand, then I guess the US is 100% safe and crime-free, provided you take your mom's basement as reference area.
This is definitely not true. Guns are commonly used in domestic violence situations, or just random household accidents, in a way that poses more danger to Americans everywhere than that experienced by the vast majority of western Europeans (except maybe for those few in the equivalents of their "Chiraqs").
Counting them like this is extremely depressing yet accurate.