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Comment by iamnotacrook | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking of mass shooting 2019/247, not mass shooting 2019/248. (Yes, we're up to more than one a day on average now)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...

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I find lists like those very disingenuous. For example look at source 25 "During an attempted home invasion, shots were fired and four people were wounded". In other words, four criminals tried to rob a home but the resident of the house shot 4 of them and three of them are in the hospital and one has been released to jail.

I wouldn't categories that incident along with the two recent "actual" mass shootings.

So your challenging the definition of a mass shooting they use because it somehow doesn't cohere with your personal thoughts about it. But the problem of defining a mass shooting and that various definitions are controversial is mentioned in the very first paragraph of that page.

I cannot find anything disingenous about choosing an official definition and mentioning that it is problematic in the first paragraph.

I would characterize the home invaders as the "perpetrators" in that particular story and exclude them from the injury count, consistent with the language of that definition.

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.

Yes, they use the official definition of the term "mass shooting", as it was adopted after 2013 by the US congress, which defines it as a shooting with 3 or more victims. Moreover, they mention in the very first paragraph that the definition is controversial and problematic, and they mention all alternative official definitions (e.g. before 2013) explicitly in the following paragraphs.

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.

> they use the official definition of the term "mass shooting", as it was adopted after 2013 by the US congress, which defines it as a shooting with 3 or more victims.

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.

Wikipedia has an extra page on that, which I took as the basis of my comment.

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.

The term that you're quoting the US Congress definition of is "mass killing".

If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

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.

> If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

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).

Wait, I was wrong. The definitions clearly differentiate between number of people shot and number of people killed, and the Wikipedia article is explicit about the sources used and the definitions used by the sources.

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.

While most forum disputes are about words, I think that @frittig makes a valid point in questioning whether the lawful shooting of active criminal home invaders ought to be considered a "mass shooting" just because there happened to be a lot of home invaders. So, yes it's about words in part, but also about concepts.

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.

You are apparently looking at this from the perspective of the victims only, but the burglars were also armed and shooting. They have been arrested for it: "... charges including first-degree burglary, conspiracy, shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony" [Oklahoma News 4, emphasis mine]

> 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.)

That's exactly what I mean. No injuries to innocents; dangerous crime (armed home invasion) thwarted.

Ugh, everyone loves to dredge up gun violence archive and use it as an authorative source and it's trash. They deliberately inflate the numbers of "mass shootings" by changing the definition from the FBI definition (itself occasionally modified for political reasons). The net result is that every half assed gangland drive-by with a handgun gets lumped in and people don't understand that. Outside of Chiraq and a couple of other places gun violence doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. You're literally safer anywhere in America outside of those places than Western Europe. This is absolutely done on purpose to help push an agenda.

This is getting ridiculous. The reason why these classification of mass shootings was invented (by US Congress) is quite the opposite of what you suggest, namely to make sure that gang-related violence and "ordinary" shootings are included into the statistics Why? So politicians can point to cities like Chicago and argue that the police needs more powers instead of having to deal with the unpleasant reality of amok runs and domestic terrorism which cannot be prevented very easily and are often cited as an argument for tighter gun control.

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.

"Outside of Chiraq and a couple of other places gun violence doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. You're literally safer anywhere in America outside of those places than Western Europe."

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").

This list gives me shivers...is the USA a scary, uncivilized country?

Yes, and it always has been. The murder rate per capita in the US has consistently been 5-10x higher than in Europe for the entire 20th century. Long before gun control, social safety nets, the drug war, or any other difference you might want to blame. The US is a low cohesion, high violence society.

As someone who grew up in the US, lived in the EU, Australia and NZ for a number of years, I can say on a day to day basis, it's still pretty much nothing.

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.

Violent crime in the USA is at rates about 50% of what it was 30 years ago. The USA is actually a much more civilized country than it’s been for a long time! We just hear more about the problems thanks to the ease of communication nowadays.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...

The replies to this are baffling. Of course not. It’s a huge, incredibly diverse and heterogeneous country of ~300 million people.

I spend about 8 months/year in the United States (Silicon Valley) and 4 months/year in Israel. I do "feel" a bit safer in Israel than the U.S. (for example I don't like travelling in San Francisco. I fear for personal safety on the streets and on Muni, and you have to garage your car otherwise it will be broken in to).

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.

New York didn't even had a (public) police force until the 1850's, with 300k inhabitants. And there was literal brawling between competing police forces for during the first years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_P...

>2019/247 >2019/248

Counting them like this is extremely depressing yet accurate.

I have no words that let me express my opinion of politicians that are willing to let this go on in a way that doesn't blatantly violate the rules of this site.

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