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Here is an Axios article where Gemini is getting its information from:
> https://www.axios.com/2023/07/31/us-mass-shooting-2-every-da...
The data is available at: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
We are at 300 so far this year. You can click on mass shootings and get an enumerated list for this year with incidents and sources, I'm not sure if you can go back to other years also:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
You could sample some of the incidents and see if they are being honest or not.
The fact that you want to go with your feels and that you have the balls to degrade someone else who was actually correct is really what says everything we need to know:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
FWIW your "reasonable definition" of mass shooter requiring the victims to be unknown by the shooter seems totally unreasonable to me, and it's not used by any organization that actually tracks these things (the Wikipedia article gives a list of definitions, none of them conforming to yours).
The vast majority of mass shootings don't make national news, because they happen in high poverty areas. It's not just the inner city, there are parts of rural America that are also quite violent.
It makes the news when someone who "shouldn't be killed" gets killed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United...
That's a very low bar.
You seem to be unfamiliar with it. Perhaps you might brush up on that?
Just a crazy thought. Toodles!
Really? Providing definitions of words that seem not to be in one's vocabulary is hateful?
Let's see:
hateful[0] (adjective) 1 : full of hate : malicious 2 : deserving of or arousing hate
Defining words arouses hate?
Should I warn the fine folks over at Merriam Webster that you might come for them?
Or is it that you think suggesting that context is an important part of understanding language is a hateful endeavour?
Please, do tell. This is fascinating!
I wish you well and hope there are folks who will welcome you and make you feel loved. Is that more hateful stuff too, friend?
Not gonna happen.
It's not hateful at all. I wish you no ill will whatsoever.
I'm just calling out what seems pretty clearly to be your lack of nuance/flexibility of the language. Which is something you might expect from a recent English language learner or a child.
Are you one of those? If not, you're pretty clearly being deliberately obtuse.
I won't hazard a guess as to why you might do such a thing, as that would likely be uncharitable.
I'll sum up, in case you're still confused: Calling you out for your tone deafness and/or deliberate obtuseness isn't hateful at all.
In fact, it's meant to inform you of the above as a service, so that you might provide higher quality discourse here.
As for being "hateful," I have no quarrel with you. I wish no harm on you, nor have you earned my ire. Rather, I have no strong feelings about you one way or the other.
If a mild remonstration is considered to be "hateful" by you, I can hardly imagine your reaction to actual verbal abuse. I expect it wouldn't be pretty.
That's how low of a bar I'll set and they still can't meet it.
Gang related incidents are something entirely different.
The definition should not obscure the two (but it would be politically inconvenient to separate them)
Just because we picture one thing when we hear a term doesn't change the agreed upon definition of the term.
If the definition of "mass shooting" were a single person, 600 is still way too many to have in a year.
Other developed countries have fewer than 600 gun-related deaths total per year. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/10/31/1209683...
The fact that upping the bar to 4 per incident and still gets us 600 is frankly shameful.
> it would be politically inconvenient to separate them
Why? No sane person in the United States "likes" gun violence. I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "600 incidents of a firearm killing 4 or more people is too many incidents." The question that divides people is how we ought to control it.
We don't. What's happening in America with the gun violence is uniquely horrifying.
Every time. It's sad that it takes a satirical newspaper to point out the obvious truth.
IIRC, the difference lies in how many people are involved versus how many people are killed.
3 Students, Including Attacker, Shot at Colorado High School, Authorities Say
Three students, including a shooting suspect, were critically injured in a shooting at a suburban high school in Colorado on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said.
That's just one below a common mass shooting definition threshold.
It's telling that event, leading news in any other country, will likely get buried below the Kirk shooting as "just another day in the USofA".
The majority of "mass shootings" are gang related. Just from gang members with many prior felony's shooting each other (and maybe innocents getting hit in the process sometimes)
This is kept from you purposefully.
No it’s not. This is constantly reiterated in many news outlets. In fact, Charlie Kirk was probably making that exact point at the time he was shot (my opinion based on his last sentence).
I won't be satisfied until we change the definition. Including gang violence from people with multiple felonies is not useful to the conversation.
Why should we not count gangs and felons killing 4+ people at once as "mass killing"?!
Because their victims may know them somehow? It's still a serious incident which would be much less likely if guns were illegal. And all we'd lose is some sport shooting and ego points.
The stuff you do to "solve" drive-bys and targeted drug industry violence won't solve school shootings and vise versa.
To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine), as the people who use a slight of hand to include prescription abuse in stats about cross-border drug smuggling or the people who try and act like literally every instance of domestic violence is the fault of alcohol or whatever. Nobody with even a shred of decency would stand behind those latter two examples. It speaks volumes about HN that the mass-shooting slight of hand is fine though.
And this isn't just a mass shooting crime issue. This is a "people feel emboldened to lie and be shitty because there is no consequence" issue. Bad people perform comparable dishonest slights of hand on all sorts of issues.
Are you sure about that? There are probably some differences in prevention and response, but also plenty of similarities too. Like better mental healthcare, outlawing private gun ownership, and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.
> To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine)...
So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?
Targeting the overlap (mental health, guns, etc) is stupid and inefficient unless your goal is to take some action that can be done under that pretext and you don't really care about resource expenditure toward results. There's only so much political capital and surplus wealth round to be directed toward such ends. Something like gun control is massively political expensive. There's cheaper ways to get the same result.
I think the suggestion of addressing non-violent conflict resolution is a great example of that sort of "well I want to do a thing and this is my justification" because while it would certainly address the "traditional crime" end it's perhaps a generally good thing to do but it's not going to affect the mass shootings much because those people typically have little to no conflict with who they're shooting.
>So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?
Yes, and just to be clear I'm also advocating for all sorts of marginalization under the law short of violence leading up to that. Like all matters of law and social norms such marginalization is necessarily backed in violence though perhaps circuitously. The way I see it speech makes us all fractionally responsible for the results of what our words endorse. If society is willing to pay a bunch of cops to levy violence upon people over fairly petty misdeeds then I think it's at least arguably justifiable to direct the same kinds of violence at people who's speech greatly furthers tings and riles up people toward ends that are huge negatives. Politicians, news people, internet personalities ought not to be able to rile people up and then wash their hands of it saying that they were not there when the bricks got thrown or people to get shot.
I'm also aware that this is bad for freedom and human rights but that ship sailed so long ago. If we're going to have prolific law enforcement and subject as many things as we do to it, allegedly for the betterment of society, then screw it, lets' do speech too. If we're all gonna get stomped by the jackboot like this is singapore we might as well enjoy the upsides.
That said, I do agree that people who incite violence in subtle ways--say yelling "fight, fight, fight" to an armed mob then sitting by for hours as they storm the capital--should share in the blame and suffer consequences for their incitement and the neglect of their oaths to protect.
>This is kept from you purposefully.
Right. And since "gang members" are, of course largely ones with a higher melanin content than you and are either foreign born, the children of immigrants or the descendants of folks kidnapped and enslaved here, they're all obviously sub-human and therefore their deaths don't count as much as folks like you, right?
Don't be shy. It's okay to speak up about it these days. That's a good bigot. Nice bigot.