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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone so caught up with the definition of "school shooting", and why isn't anyone providing any sources to back up their own personal definitions of what it means? The links below are the top 3 results when I googled "school shooting definition", and they all boil down to "a shooting that happened at a school."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/school-shooting

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

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-455.pdf

I ask this in good faith: why does the definition have to be so specific? What is the problem with defining a "school shooting" as "a shooting that happened at a school"?

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When people hear "school shooting", they're generally envisioning something like Columbine - an event with a large number of casualties, targeting students as a group, and lasting until the shooter(s) is killed.

They are not thinking "drive-by gang shooting at 9pm that happens to be on or near school property". They're not even generally thinking "student kills another student after argument."

Labeling all of these categories (and more) with the same label leads to emotionally-driven political opinions and policies, which are often inappropriate and not proportional to the actual problem.

No one is suggesting that "near school property" counts. (The rest of your argument may be in good faith).

> why does the definition have to be so specific?

The definition has to be specific because the words "school shooting" mean different things, mentally and emotionally, to different people. Another commenter posted that "a weapon discharged in a school parking lot, at midnight" would count the same quantity as a Columbine. To me, those two events just aren't of the same gravity.

(to be clear, NO shootings in and around schools, involving children or otherwise, is the correct number of school shootings to have, in my opinion).

I, at least to align the definition with my take on the common thought process, need the definition to include schoolchildren in danger or harmed/worse. It's too ambiguous to include "oops i pulled the trigger aiming at the ground, on a weekend" in the same category as Columbine or similar tragedies.

If we want to get serious about solving the problem, it starts by quantifying the problem. Otherwise it isn't falsifiable, and is unscientific.

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